Difficult, perplexing and often cinematically beautiful movie. One is warmly recommended to see it at least twice - although having seen it two times I still don't understand all of it.
This is either because I'm stupid or because Pasolini doesn't quite manage to translate his complex ideas into an accessible piece of cinema. The jury's out on that one. Nevertheless, "Porcile" is a rich and satisfying art film.
It is - and this is not mentioned often enough - a surreal film. The two intertwining stories (one taking place in Germany 1967 and the other in 16th or 17th century Italy at the base of Mount Etna) have only one concrete thing in common, a secondary actor appearing in both stories. Also, the older story may or may not be imagined by the central figure, Julian (played by the legendary Jean-Pierre Leaud), the son of a rich industrialist (who looks like a satirized Hitler). Julian has some issues. It is hinted, or more than just hinted, that this boy surrounded by wealth and disconnected from the real world, cocooned in his intellectual abstractions, is so incapable of creating a rapport with the girl she loves, that he gets his sexual release in the confines of a pigstine. Similarly, the protagonist in the other story, coming from absolute poverty, resorts to cannibalism and professes himself to have killed his father and feeling exstatic about it.
Almost certainly every line and scene has a meaning to it, but the pieces don't seem to always fit the puzzle. One consequence of this is the lack of bite in the darkly ironic humour in the scenes with Julian's father and his adversery, a former nazi, who uses Julian's scandalous habits to wrangle the father into business with him.
The potent ideas are there, anyway, and stay in your mind for a long time after. As does the work of the master cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli: the scenes by Mount Etna are especially striking.
Although it might at first seem like "Porcile" belittles the wonderful species of the pig, they might in the end come out as the winners of this condemnation of the state of humanity.
Noteworthy: another great Italian director and iconoclast, Marco Ferreri, makes an appearance.
This is either because I'm stupid or because Pasolini doesn't quite manage to translate his complex ideas into an accessible piece of cinema. The jury's out on that one. Nevertheless, "Porcile" is a rich and satisfying art film.
It is - and this is not mentioned often enough - a surreal film. The two intertwining stories (one taking place in Germany 1967 and the other in 16th or 17th century Italy at the base of Mount Etna) have only one concrete thing in common, a secondary actor appearing in both stories. Also, the older story may or may not be imagined by the central figure, Julian (played by the legendary Jean-Pierre Leaud), the son of a rich industrialist (who looks like a satirized Hitler). Julian has some issues. It is hinted, or more than just hinted, that this boy surrounded by wealth and disconnected from the real world, cocooned in his intellectual abstractions, is so incapable of creating a rapport with the girl she loves, that he gets his sexual release in the confines of a pigstine. Similarly, the protagonist in the other story, coming from absolute poverty, resorts to cannibalism and professes himself to have killed his father and feeling exstatic about it.
Almost certainly every line and scene has a meaning to it, but the pieces don't seem to always fit the puzzle. One consequence of this is the lack of bite in the darkly ironic humour in the scenes with Julian's father and his adversery, a former nazi, who uses Julian's scandalous habits to wrangle the father into business with him.
The potent ideas are there, anyway, and stay in your mind for a long time after. As does the work of the master cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli: the scenes by Mount Etna are especially striking.
Although it might at first seem like "Porcile" belittles the wonderful species of the pig, they might in the end come out as the winners of this condemnation of the state of humanity.
Noteworthy: another great Italian director and iconoclast, Marco Ferreri, makes an appearance.