The Hawks and the Sparrows

                  

The Hawks and the Sparrows, from 1966, is Piero Pasolini's most affable and goofy picture. He thought it was his most fully realized film and his affection for rural Italy is palpable throughout. The movie is a road comedy featuring two innocents: an older man, played by Italian cinematic legend Toto, and his son played by Pasolini's then 17 year old boyfriend, Ninetto Davoli. Toto's placid theatricality is counterpointed with Davoli's amateurish enthusiasm. Aged repose is contrasted with youthful energy. There are enough silent comedy style yucks to assuage those put off by Pasolini's Marxist rhetoric and anti-papal jibes. The film is both a follow-up and an antidote to Pasolini's last film, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. The reverence for Jesus displayed in that film is replaced by an irreverence for Catholic doctrine. 

Toto and Davoli are joined on their journey by a talking crow who later describes himself as a "leftist intellectual". The crow tells the fable of the hawks and sparrows that takes up the first half of the film. In it, Toto and Davoli play two medieval friars who are tasked by St. Francis to spread the word of God to our fair feathered friends. After much comic hardship and frivolity, the pair achieve a measure of success. However, they are shattered when they come upon a hawk preying upon a sparrow. St. Francis urges forbearance in their mission, but Pasolini's point is clear that, despite Christian bromides, man lives in a natural jungle where predation is second nature. Pasolini links these predations to contemporary capitalism in the second half and even has a restaging of Christ routing the merchants and moneylenders from the temple in the medieval section. Taking a dump in a field brings the ire of a local farmer in a sardonic segment that is akin to the populist Marxism of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" in its mockery of private property.

The film ends with the duo, hungry and tired of the crow's endless harangues, endeavoring to consume the critter. A suitable ending to a film where, for once, Pasolini bears his thematic concerns lightly. One of the big plusses to the film is Ennio Morricone's lively score. The opening titles and credits are sung in mock epic style for comic effect. There are a number of sequences, however,  that feel shoehorned in, a cafe scene where tight trousered young men do the frug and footage of the funeral of Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti's funeral, but, on the whole, The Hawks and the Sparrows is a delight. However, the Italian public thought otherwise. This film had the worst box office showing of Toto's career. What does the public know, though, most of Toto's efforts were in wafer thin burlesques of popular films like Cleopatra and were not worthy of his talents. If you enjoy The Hawks and the Sparrows, I'm sure you will enjoy the short film Toto and Pasolini also collaborated on, The Earth Seen from the Moon which is part of the anthology film, The Witches .

Quick Takes, January 2024

 

Adele Exarchopoulos and Melanie Laurent

Melanie Laurent's Wingwomen is an affable heist and female buddy movie. There is very little here that is new, but Adele Exarchopoulos and Ms. Laurent have an engaging, Redford/Newman vibe between the two of them. Pity about the feeble ending. With Manon Bresch and Isabelle Adjani. Streaming on Netflix. 

Tom George's See How They Run attempts to craft a backstage mystery out of the original production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan are the Mutt and Jeff team helming the investigation. Rockwell is miscast and Ronan is reduced to playing a chipper neophyte. Mark Chappell's script, which wittily plays with the mystery structure, is deficit in exploring character and no rapport is built between the two leads. George's direction is consistently lead footed with split screens used to feeble effect. The talented supporting cast, including Ruth Wilson and Shirley Henderson as Ms. Christie, is underused. The one bright spot is Amanda McArthur's witty production design.

Bill Norton's Cisco Pike, released after much delay in 1972 , was Kris Kristofferson's film debut. Kristofferson stars as a struggling musician who is forced by a corrupt cop (Gene Hackman) to return to dealing in order to keep out of jail. The plot meanders, but the film provides an interesting look at LA circa 1970. Kristofferson shows promise, but I wouldn't call what he does here acting. The main delights of this feckless film are on its fringes where a host of interesting performers and character actors steal the spotlight, including Karen Black, Roscoe Lee Browne, Harry Dean Stanton, Severn Darden, Viva, Joy Bang, Antonio Fargas, Howard Hesseman, Doug Sahm, and Wavy Gravy.

Jalmari Helander's Sisu is a Finnish action film set in the waning days of World War 2. A miner in Lapland is left for dead by a column of retreating Nazi soldiers. He proceeds to exact a pitiless revenge. One needs to swallow a certain amount of mythic hooey to enjoy this restrained and largely silent gore fest. Action fans will be rewarded by a well-constructed and, darest I say, elegant slice of carnage. This testimonial to Finnish fortitude augurs that country's embrace of NATO; so back off or beware, Vlad. 

Emerald Fennell's Saltburn is a black comic mashup of Brideshead Revisited and Teorema. Too obvious and not funny enough to be effective satire, the film struggles to find a consistent tone. The intimations of pagan sacrifice and the occult (that sulphureous title) also come to naught. Barry Keoghan fails to bring the menace that emanated from him in The Killing of the Sacred Deer. It's nice to look at, except for the overuse of shadow during Keoghan's "erotic" encounters, and I loved the costumes, but the talented and attractive supporting cast are all adrift searching for their characters.

Mark Cousins' The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a meditative look at the career of the maverick English film producer (The Last Emperor, Crash). As is his want, documentarian Cousins injects himself into the picture; most of the film was shot on a road trip to Cannes Cousins took with Thomas. Since the two men share a passionate cinephilia, the results are fruitful. Those not familiar with Thomas' filmography, particularly the films he produced for director Nicolas Roeg, might want to steer clear,

Alice Winocour's Revoir Paris features Virginie Efira as the survivor of a terrorist attack dealing with the resultant trauma, guilt, and shame. Winocour's supple direction makes this a seamless and effective drama, but the plot's machinations sometimes seem predictable and pat. Still, the film provides a look at an interesting and varied cross-section of Parisian society with ample opportunity for the supporting cast to shine, especially Benoit Magimel.

Virginie Efira

Dragnet Girl

Joji Oka contemplates the virtues of (fido) fidelity in Dragnet Girl

Yasujirō Ozu's Dragnet Girl, from 1933 , is most often described as a crime film. yet it is equally a romantic melodrama focused on a love triangle composed of gangster Joji (Joji Oka), his moll Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), and the more traditional Kazuko (Sumiko Mizukubo) who works in a record shop. Joji is an ex-boxer and a very low level gang boss who yearns to go straight, especially after meeting the demure Kazuko. He is entranced by her, but senses that the volatile Tokiko is more his match. They vow to do one more job together and then settle down, but the last job ends up as last jobs usually do. Not a tragic ending though, for a shot of the morning light reaching a flower on the window sill ends this silent picture with a note of possible redemption.   

Dragnet Girl is a film saturated with American culture and its depiction in the crime genre. The locales ape those in found American films: the seedy flophouse lair of the gangster, the boxing gym, the pool hall, the jazz nightclub. The men's suits are all Western style and nearly all the poster art (heralding Jack Dempsey and King Vidor's The Champ) in the film hails from the USA. In the film, these are all harbingers of a future that deviates from traditional national culture. The meek and conformist Kazuko personifies the hardworking values of that culture while Tokiko is portrayed as an amoral chippie and grifter. Tokiko admits that she sees why Joji is attracted to Kazuko, a blushing virgin to her whore, and even plants a kiss on her. Despite its sexual ambiguities though, Dragnet Girl is fairly rigid in its portrayal of the superiority of the traditional as opposed the more modern and Western. Ozu three times gives us low angle shots of characters in opposite styles of garb travelling a parallel course, but never do the twain meet.

Dragnet Girl is notable for its energetic camera movement, particularly its use of tracking shots, that stand in contrast to the placid, more meditative style of Ozu's autumnal years. Ozu presents us a collection of grids and snares that serve to trap his characters or provide them a rare moment of intimacy. Ozu cuts away to reaction shots during the fight scenes, playing up not the violence, but the comic potential of those sequences. The sheer audacity and chock full of nuts potency of the mise en scene is enough to augur a classic auteur, but the scenario has unnecessary moments of repetition in its portrayal of all the angles in the romantic triangle. The cast is superb though, with Ms. Tanaka, just at the start of a brilliant career, the heart and soul of a picture in which she is its cynosure. 

Kinuyo Tanaka