SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Mariam Mansuryan I thought this movie must had had something ingenious while watching it, but couldn't really understand it. It was about a boy who does something very strange that he doesn't want to tell anyone about. He kills pigs, and at the end gets consumed by these same pigs. To his bone, without any trace left of him. And one of the characters decides it would be best if he would just had disappeared. I don't want to immediately go to the semantics of this and ask the inevitable question: what do the pigs represent, and what does the boy represent, and what does his parents' big house represent. First I want to understand the plot.There are two parallel stories, one is about a traveller who looks like the protagonist, trying to survive in a lonely land, and the other one is about a rich boy from a rich family who doesn't do anything with his life. Who is 25 but hasn't yet kissed a girl. He also used to kill pigs. For fun. He didn't need to do it, he was just so rich he didn't need to do anything really. His father is a mockery of Hitler or one of his servants, that is obvious by all the ridiculous names of the officials. The war is over, the USSR is taking on. The pigs represent the weaker, the worse types. So in this case, it may very well be that the pigs are the Jews, the Soviets, whom they had been slaughtering with such light hands. Unconsciously perhaps, the father had sent his son to do that. And the son was his father's conscience. He got destroyed, completely by those same pigs he was eating before. The conscience was actually way bigger and freer than the confining large house he lived in. The conscience was in the mountains, killing people. That seems to be another version of the protagonist's life. He kills and eats a human there. Just the same way he killed pigs in the castle. It's as if this second world is the dark reality while the first world is the beautiful illusion. In reality, it is a person he is killing. And at the end, the protagonist gets crucified by a tribe of others. So happens in the castle, just by pigs, not anyone else. It's as if there is this higher world and all the officials live in this castle where nothing is real, while the boy's true residence is there. Now why do I think he is the conscience of the father? Maybe he isn't, he is just able to see the reality.While he was probably eating healthy and luxurious foods in his father's castle, the protagonist was in reality starving in the mountains. He had a spiritual need that could only be fulfilled by eating those pigs. It was hunger for destruction, hunger that no palace could fulfill.And what about the girl? The girlfriend of course showed the period of time, she was one of those hippy kids. So now is the time where people are going against the Soviet Regime. That means, that the German era is over, all their games are fake already. At the end, the father walks out of the house, with still his proud walk. He lives the place and disappears among the guests, the waiting crowd.The girl is also very young, only seventeen. In one scene, they are walking towards each other with a lake separating them. He asks her to kiss him, first she says no, then when they reach each other, the girl wants to kiss the protagonist, but he no longer wants that kiss. This shows the longing for desire. It's like in Michelangelo's Adam's Birth. Where Adam and God are reaching towards each other but there is always this slight distance between their fingers and I think it's that distance that gives the painting all its beauty. That distance is life. If they touch, nothing is so unknown and mysterious anymore.In another scene, they are both in the house. But he is sitting in the carriage while Ida invites him out. It's a carriage in the house. One that doesn't move. It's something that maybe used to work but not anymore. Completely pointless. That shows that the boy is stuck in his life, that he is going nowhere. While she wants to move on in her life.Father and mother care about him. Father also plays the harp, which, especially in one particular sequence, is shown to control the world. As if he is controlling the world without even leaving his palace. But I don't know whether this lasts for the entire movie. There was probably another instrument which overtook at the end, I just didn't notice it.There is a lot of loneliness in the protagonist's life. He is all alone, he lives in his world and Ida leaves him too. He has this sort of double existence in his huge bed and meditative world.I don't know what I thought about this movie, I think it is definitely rewatchable, there would definitely be new things I would understand if I were to rewatch it.

chaos-rampant I thought I was going to be confronted with minor Pasolini here. I was wrong. The same caution applies here though for casual viewers. With Pasolini we come to the foot of a cave where a sage is rumored to live, we can either turn back because there's no ornate ceremony, go back to where we can be told riveting stories about heroes wrestling fate; or sit and listen (not all of it may be intelligible), enter and divine vision.It opens with young intellectuals in a lush villa ruminating on their exasperations like out of Godard, from the time when revolutions were felt to be afoot. Oh the cause may be worthy in Pasolini's eyes, most likely is; but he makes it a point to show the modern self secluded from it in idle comfort, obsessed with analyzing himself in the scheme of narratives, dissatisfied, full of unrequited cravings and contradictions.In a separate medieval story we see man as only one more beast of prey alone in the wilderness, reduced to eating a butterfly to stave his insatiable hunger. We see what lurks behind that civilized self that always expects to be pleased, or better, all that had to transpire for endless time in the wilds. It's important here to see both the contrast and the continuity. The cruel nature in man as nature.And then in a breathtaking scene we're sent scurrying through windswept volcanic rock to see the human beast confronting itself in the crossroads, someone else much like him, alone and wary. There are few scenes more primal than this in cinema.Back in the modern portion, the same meeting between rivals takes place now with a lot of coy evasion, irony and duplicity, in a palace instead of the wild, over drinks. We see how human structures in place foster collaboration in the end; but it's a corporate one for profit that puts the beast in fine clothes, changes his face even, but leaves the hunger intact.Pasolini gives us the same barbs about modern life as he has elsewhere, relishing the opportunity, but he's not a sweeping fool; in the medieval portion he makes it a point to show that it's civilized structures, church and army, that go out in the wild to punish wrongdoing, install a semblance of order.We could be talking for days about what he has woven here. Sin that you control and sin that you don't. Law as necessary civilization. Bartering as control over the narrative (pigsty / WWII in the film). Love that you provide for versus the abstract calling from inmost soul.So okay, his camera seems sloppy from afar; he wants it to be you who has the chance encounter in these wilds instead of something bled of its reality on a lavish stage, wants it to be primal, madness the gods whisper to you. You'll see near the end some marvelously elliptic narrative as he conjures visions, no accident of sloppiness there; Pasolini is once more anticipating Malick.And he's aghast at the base nature he sees in him and things, impurity weighs him down; the whole film says, I have these things gnawing inside of me that I'll pay the price for even if I didn't put them there myself. Pasolini at his rawest makes the rocks crack open.The most riveting thing about it is that we have this seer in the wild of soul, who can bring vision back. He is the one who can't stay for love because something more abstract calls his name. He is the one who strays in the pigsty at nights, who has sinned in the wilds, ate the flesh.

Stanley-Becker This movie is a testament to the power of poetry and its capacity to dwarf the medium of cinema. Pasolini merges the rites of passage towards 'bildung', {German concept for the development of civilizing Culture}, using five separate themes; - the immature rapport between a wealthy, young bourgeois couple, {named Julian and Ida}, the dilemma of Julian's parents, who desire the union, {it would be materially beneficial}, and the contrasting styles of two German plutocrats, - all this Pasolini combines and contrasts with the historical Italian vagabond life of a countryside bandit , circa the early 1500's, armed with a musket, roving the barren hilly escarpment in the Pompeian district and preying on unarmed, vulnerable Christian pilgrims on their way to Rome.Julian and Ida play at being in love - but their inexperience leads them to compromise reality with their love of words. Julian is a spoilt young man who has been infantilized by his doting mother, who in her ensuing dialogue with Ida reveals herself to be totally blind to her son's character, believing instead that Julian has all the laudable attributes of a good German. The narrative flow concerning this German family, shot as an interior with much opulence, antique furniture and Renaissance paintings, in enormous palatial rooms, which as the story moves forward, is intercut with desolate scenic waste as the vagabond displays primitive savagery, in killing, dismembering and cannibalizing his victims. These scenes are in a landscape that is evocatively lyrical and empty of civilization {that is apart from the hymns which are beautifully chanted by the pilgrims on their way to destruction}.In a parody of Godard and Truffaut, it soon becomes obvious that the love of the two 'pretty young things' is doomed to fail {as the barrier that they set up between each other with meaningless words becomes insurmountable}. The movie now shifts into its essential focus. The two plutocrats, the one, being Julian's father Herr Klotz, a German word for 'idiot' or blockhead, and the other, Herr Herdhitze, meaning 'hot fire' {possibly a reference to the exterminating ovens}, square up as two contrasting sides of the German psyche. Klotz, a humanist, is a cultivated man with a sense of cynicism and an appreciation of the accurate satirical art works of George Grosz - he sees himself depicted by Grosz sitting in a café with a sexy young secretary on his lap, cigar in his mouth and a piggish face - he also refers to Brecht's championship of the workers. Herdhitze, a technocrat, on the other hand, refers to himself as a man of science, who despises individuality, and wants to convert all the impoverished farmers to technicians - he has no soul at all.The two men face off with the core of the German problem - their love of the meat of the pig. Their dialogue .... Klotz - 'the Germans love their sausage' to which Herdhitze replies 'shit' Klotz 'but they do defecate a lot'. The ironic impasse between the two Nazis is whether Jews are pigs or not - with the added Surreal contradiction of, if the Jews are pigs why do the Germans love their pork. and why do they grunt like pigs?The year is 1959, in the German quest for an economic miracle, questions of Jews and culture are easily overcome, and the two plutocrats combine forces, in the pursuit of their worship of material wealth. Meanwhile Julian has resolved his confusion, and sacrifices himself to the totem of the pig, by going to the German Temple - the Pigsty - and there offers himself as an anointed meal to the pigsPasolini has wrought a great work of Art that might have been an Epic Poem or a great novel or a great Painting like Picasso's 'Guernica' or Goya's 'Atrocities of War'. He certainly has no sympathy whatsoever for the Nazi German and his god 'The Pig'. This is a difficult movie to digest, but it's rationale is crystal clear. If you are interested in the History of the Intellect, then this movie is unmissable.

quinye I honestly admit that this film was not easy for me. But I believe that the only intention of director was to express language more beautiful and therefore with more power and suggestion. And I think this is why Pasolini is Pasolini and not Spielberg. There are three important pillars in this society that converts, under Pasolini's view, our existence in corruption: capitalism, Burgess and catholic religion. Somebody has already talked about the first (Burgess is a consequence) but I didn't heard anything yet of catholic religion. The second history (dream of the first?) ends up by dogs eating bodies of those men who first were forced to kiss the cross. Julian died devoured by pigs. Both had follow opposite ways of compromise but both died because of the beasts. What I understand is that even if Julian had followed second history (...I killed my father, I ate human flesh...) cannibalism of these powers would have defeated him. The role of the priests in second history is just to denounce the intolerance, hypocrisy and aim of power and control of Catholic religion.