The close-set and benign features on the face of the Italian actor Ninetto Davoli seem to incarnate stupidity more completely than in any other actor that I’ve ever seen. It is almost uncanny, the perfect embodiment of a trait not always easy to bring out—and not always gratifying to bring to life as an actor, to be sure. But Davoli does it, and so utterly that I’ve moved beyond seeing in his performance that of a jester, an idiot, or a freak, so that now this magical feat has become impressive more than anything else. And impressive is what it is. To have that caliber of character acting can garner respect.
As for the remainder of the sprawling and unruly trilogy directed by the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Trilogy of Life, which comes laden with the cultural baggage of having been an iconoclastic, iron-willed frenzy of a creation whose frank sexuality once made the Church start frothing at the mouth, I have to admit that I’m much less impressed. My first takeaway is that the installments are uneven: the first and the third, The Decameron (1971) and The Arabian Nights (1974), are to my mind better than that devilish middle one, The Canterbury Tales (1972), which seems to have taken so much liberty with the source material that it’s best understood as a gleeful, shameless roll in the mud. And of the other two, it is the third and last, the finale, The Arabian Nights, which I find the most high-spirited and purified.
And it has been purified all right, not only of the general air of sexual repression motivating Pasolini to play the cultural rebel with his free-for-all depiction of sexuality—and let’s admit it, not one of the installments betrays signs of having been censored or prudish, God forbid—but more importantly it has been purified of the other and opposite tendency, this one falling to the director: that of the gleeful, in-your-face disdain for the established norms and dogmas, to the point that Pasolini seems to be rebelling just to rebel, rather than in the service of some artistic purpose.
But The Arabian Nights skirts around this tendency of the two previous installments, and all the lightness of sexual liberty, an openness to humans as they are, rises to the surface where the other two sink into grotesque ridicule. Moments of its fading glory in the final scene come to mind: the smiling face of Nur Ed Din, played by Franco Merli, upon his discovery that the king is his beloved Zumurrud; the puckish and robust laughter of the latter, played by Ines Pellegrini, as natural and buoyant as though she weren’t acting at all; the ragtag group of children pursuing Nur Ed Din through the streets of the dusty Arabian village as he calls out frantically for his beloved, who has fallen captive to other men and their evil ways.
Another strong impression from all the installments—as much in the final as in the first two—is that a strong, virile nature embodied in the act of sex comes up as a self-perpetuating force, almost in spite of the intention or interest of any single male. Man and his penis are a means to the end of perpetuating the species, and the boys happily captured and seduced time and again by what appear to be the hordes of vibrant and fertile females seem almost to be blindsided, spirited away by nature in their otherwise humdrum, sexless lives. Then the women flitting to and fro have their way with them and they’re spat back out, drifting again and empty in the void, their seed spent and applied to something that is now alien, no more than a funny abstraction.
As with so many Pasolini movies, the visual elements of The Trilogy of Life can be sumptuous and entrancing. Even in those scenes where the finger-licking ridicule and grubbiness is just over the top—as for instance that of the countless friars launched into the air as though out of a cannon from the devil’s farting anus, all of them condemned to a hell of Pasolini’s wild invention—the images retain a kind of power, impressive in a different way (let’s make that clear) because it is so vigorous, so bold, and so unhindered.
A director with a controversial and homosexual past in a postwar Italian landscape where the frank display of sexuality—and especially that of homosexuality—was bound to cause uneasiness, and at the time an outspoken Marxist in the welter of the reigning political movements, Pasolini created his projects in the midst of some serious backlash. And something like the whirl of his polemical lifestyle ended up with him on a beach in Ostia in 1975, murdered and mangled, his body crushed by the wheels of his own car.
It is perhaps no coincidence that a director whose work desecrates the sacred ideals of entire segments of the population, and ridicules the foundations of the lives and politics of others, ends up himself desecrated on a beach in Ostia, as though to all appearances he was out looking for trouble. Life seems to have many such coincidences, the twisted conclusions to a world set against itself. What can be said for Pasolini, as for any figure of his caliber doing what he did, is that he had integrity together with some serious mettle. Here was a man willing to expose himself—sometimes quite literally—to put across ideals and beliefs that were his own. Could he be grotesque? Sure. Inartistic? That is undoubted. And polemical just for the hell of it? You bet. But one adjective unassociated with his name is uninteresting, because he never was.
This is one of the outspoken figures of the twentieth century, and I’ll be damned if he’s not remembered in the thirtieth.
