Pasolini's Oedipus Rex is a crazy, brutish parade of primitivism, psychosis and weird head-gear - the play as Sophocles himself might've mounted it were he under the influence of some strong hallucinogen. This is one of Pasolini's favorite pastimes, the staging of old literary works as nut-job pageants suffused with a genuine feel for the random craziness of ritual, the sense of people adorning themselves in keeping with impenetrably bizarre superstitious imperatives. The array of outlandish head-wear in this movie would be enough for a museum - three-foot-tall cylindrical gold crowns; helmets composed of curved iron segments dangling from the brim of a saucer-shaped hat; garlands of woven straw worn not horizontally around the skull but vertically ringing the face. Even the Oracle of Delphi gets in on the act, sporting a tall snow-man-shaped pottery-mask-looking contraption with a sprig of vegetation sticking out the top. It's as if ancient life were nothing but one big act of head-wear oneupmanship.
The play survives intact despite Pasolini's odd-ball preoccupations. The director's favorite Cro-Magnon thespian, Franco Citti, portrays the hapless Oedipus, while the formidable Silvana Mangano tackles the role of Jocasta, Oedy's self-absorbed mother/wife. The melodrama plays out with all its earth-shaking inevitability, following Oedipus from foundling to patricidal loon to incestuous king to blind wandering fool; Pasolini staging the action so bluntly, so rawly, that we could be watching an ancient performance captured by curious aliens with movie-cameras. The acting as usual is variable. Citti, a physically striking if technically inept actor, creates an Oedipus who seems completely free of snappy psychological accoutrement - an Oedipus who is, quite literally, an over-grown child. As Jocasta, Mangano displays the kind of subtle technical command that Citti utterly lacks, but doesn't have enough scenes to really bring forth a character (Pasolini uses her mostly as an embodiment of overwhelming feminine presence, much as he did Maria Callas in Medea, the companion-piece to Oedipus). There's very little that's subtle about the way Pasolini attacks the central psychological issues of Oedipus, the stuff that has made for one psychiatric treatise after another since the days of Freud. The emotions are splashed all over the screen in typically unrestrained Pasolini fashion. Oedipus is a ranting lunatic; the scene where he kills his father, Laius the King of Thebes, is a homicidal tantrum to make Travis Bickle blush. Citti is not a commanding enough actor to give his scenes any real melodramatic weight, but this doesn't matter given that Pasolini is less interested in melodrama than he is in conveying the idea of psychosis as a kind of universal human condition. This is not Oedipus the grand tragic figure, this is Oedipus the psychopath. There is little in this character that could be described as redeeming - he's a cowardly, childish, mindlessly violent hypocrite. He wears a false beard to show that he's a false king, and after he blinds himself, so he will no longer have to look upon the horrors he himself has been guilty of unleashing, Pasolini transports him to the modern world for a sort of ironic coda that, like the central juxtaposition in his semi-masterpiece Porcile, makes explicit his point about modern humanity's inability to escape its own primal urges.
This isn't Intro to Greek Literature Sophocles, it's a mining of Sophocles for the kind of brutishness that turns Pasolini's crank. The question one must ask again is, How the hell does Pasolini get away with it? Why does the kind of material that would seem the stuff of exploitation and rank tastelessness in another director's hand become, in Pasolini's, the stuff of primitive/modern art? There's nothing particularly beautiful in the images, except for the savage beauty of the prehistoric settings. There's almost none of that high-culture flush that symbolists like Fellini and Bergman were able to give their film-buff-coddling "masterpieces." The secret must be in Pasolini's straight-forwardness, his complete lack of moral pretense. He's one of the few directors I can think of who could get away with turning Oedipus into an example of humanity's inherently psychotic nature and still not come across like a high-minded putz. He tears Oedipus Rex down from the realm of stodgy high-culture and re-envisions it as a cry of psychopathic rage, set in a world as inscrutable as the mind.
The play survives intact despite Pasolini's odd-ball preoccupations. The director's favorite Cro-Magnon thespian, Franco Citti, portrays the hapless Oedipus, while the formidable Silvana Mangano tackles the role of Jocasta, Oedy's self-absorbed mother/wife. The melodrama plays out with all its earth-shaking inevitability, following Oedipus from foundling to patricidal loon to incestuous king to blind wandering fool; Pasolini staging the action so bluntly, so rawly, that we could be watching an ancient performance captured by curious aliens with movie-cameras. The acting as usual is variable. Citti, a physically striking if technically inept actor, creates an Oedipus who seems completely free of snappy psychological accoutrement - an Oedipus who is, quite literally, an over-grown child. As Jocasta, Mangano displays the kind of subtle technical command that Citti utterly lacks, but doesn't have enough scenes to really bring forth a character (Pasolini uses her mostly as an embodiment of overwhelming feminine presence, much as he did Maria Callas in Medea, the companion-piece to Oedipus). There's very little that's subtle about the way Pasolini attacks the central psychological issues of Oedipus, the stuff that has made for one psychiatric treatise after another since the days of Freud. The emotions are splashed all over the screen in typically unrestrained Pasolini fashion. Oedipus is a ranting lunatic; the scene where he kills his father, Laius the King of Thebes, is a homicidal tantrum to make Travis Bickle blush. Citti is not a commanding enough actor to give his scenes any real melodramatic weight, but this doesn't matter given that Pasolini is less interested in melodrama than he is in conveying the idea of psychosis as a kind of universal human condition. This is not Oedipus the grand tragic figure, this is Oedipus the psychopath. There is little in this character that could be described as redeeming - he's a cowardly, childish, mindlessly violent hypocrite. He wears a false beard to show that he's a false king, and after he blinds himself, so he will no longer have to look upon the horrors he himself has been guilty of unleashing, Pasolini transports him to the modern world for a sort of ironic coda that, like the central juxtaposition in his semi-masterpiece Porcile, makes explicit his point about modern humanity's inability to escape its own primal urges.
This isn't Intro to Greek Literature Sophocles, it's a mining of Sophocles for the kind of brutishness that turns Pasolini's crank. The question one must ask again is, How the hell does Pasolini get away with it? Why does the kind of material that would seem the stuff of exploitation and rank tastelessness in another director's hand become, in Pasolini's, the stuff of primitive/modern art? There's nothing particularly beautiful in the images, except for the savage beauty of the prehistoric settings. There's almost none of that high-culture flush that symbolists like Fellini and Bergman were able to give their film-buff-coddling "masterpieces." The secret must be in Pasolini's straight-forwardness, his complete lack of moral pretense. He's one of the few directors I can think of who could get away with turning Oedipus into an example of humanity's inherently psychotic nature and still not come across like a high-minded putz. He tears Oedipus Rex down from the realm of stodgy high-culture and re-envisions it as a cry of psychopathic rage, set in a world as inscrutable as the mind.