Pier Paolo Pasolini was going through some stuff when he made The Hawks and the Sparrows. This comedy, complete with a delightful score by Ennio Morricone, is obviously some form of self-therapy on Pasolini's part as he deals with the death of Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party (an organization that kicked Pasolini out because of his homosexuality), and the seeming failure of Marxism to bring about a change in humanity required for the promised utopia on Earth. It's kind of obvious and not all that subtle in the telling of the film, either, and it's an interesting look into the mind of a man dealing with the failure of ideology, as he puts it, packaged as a road comedy.
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REPORT THIS AD Toto (Toto) and his son Ninetto (Ninetto Davoli) are on a walk through the Italian countryside for an unspoken purpose. After stopping at a small town to witness a crowd waiting for the bodies of a married couple to be brought out of their house and into an ambulance, a delay that gives Ninetto an opportunity to steal a kiss from a pretty girl, they encounter a talking crow (Francesco Leonetti). The film has an eventual intertitle in between its two halves that make it explicit that the crow is a left-wing intellectual of the kind that roamed the earth before the death of Togliatti. Quite seriously, I had to look up who Togliatti was, having no clue who he could be. The film makes no effort to explain it (something I have an issue with) which makes the film feel more personal to Pasolini than any of his previous three films.
As previously stated, the film is presented in two halves. The first is primarily concerned with the crow's telling of the story of two religious brothers (played by Toto and Davoli as well) sent by Saint Francis of Assisi (Renato Montalbano) to convert the titular hawks and sparrows to belief in God. The two efforts are amusing in their own right with Brother Ciccillo kneeling in one spot for two separate years learning the languages of the two birds (the hawks do it vocally, the sparrows hop to communicate) with vines growing all over him while he kneels before the hawks and a festival to take advantage of his praying popping up around him for the sparrows. The tragedy is that despite the birds' conversion, they still retain their natural instincts, the hawks still hunting, killing, and eating the sparrows. Francis tells them to go off and continue to proselytize the birds until they change.
The second half shows the pecking order of Italian society with Toto being the middle class, demanding rents from his tenants while his own landlord demands payment from him, Toto offering similar excuses for being unable to pay as his own tenants had. These events the crow observes with witty detachment while also increasingly succumbing to the realization that nothing in human nature will change. There are also some events with a traveling circus, a birth, and a prostitute, Luna (Femi Benussi) that both father and son take into the fields before Toto has the idea, since they haven't eaten all day, of killing and eating the crow.
That ending, with the crow nothing but charred remains and dismembered feathers (in an image that looks like it exploded and wasn't eaten), especially after the newsreel footage of Togliatti's funeral (seriously, out of no where and I had to look it up), is obviously a reflection of some strain of thought Pasolini had in his head at the time. I think he saw himself in the crow, and the crow meeting this terrible ending while realizing that all of his words meant nothing because human nature continues is kind of depressing. Pasolini had some realization that his Marxist utopia was never going to come about because hawks will continue to eat sparrows no matter what. The powerful will always prey on the weak, and the death of Togliatti somehow was the trigger in his mind for how that was never going to change.
And yet, it's presented in this light comic form. A lot of the action is sped up, especially Toto's comic antics which make the comparisons to silent comics like Chaplin (Toto has a very similar walk to the Tramp) easier to make. The effervescent tone helps the quick film move from little event to little event, each one bearing some value upon the film's central point of a fallen world (like when Toto goes to defecate in a stranger's field, leading to an escalation of events that ends with them being shot at from the distant house as they jump around comically) that will never change.
So, it's lightly amusing. Toto gives an entertaining central performance while Ninetto Davoli has some fun physicality in his supporting role. The opening credits, sung, are actually quite funny. The parable of the hawks and the sparrows is fun. The ironic contrast between Toto's treatment of his tenants and his landowner's treatment of him is interesting. However, this is a deeply personal film for Pasolini, and he includes elements that seem designed to keep an audience at bay a bit. I would consider The Hawks and the Sparrows to be his least successful film so far, but it's still amusing and interesting at the same time.
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REPORT THIS AD Toto (Toto) and his son Ninetto (Ninetto Davoli) are on a walk through the Italian countryside for an unspoken purpose. After stopping at a small town to witness a crowd waiting for the bodies of a married couple to be brought out of their house and into an ambulance, a delay that gives Ninetto an opportunity to steal a kiss from a pretty girl, they encounter a talking crow (Francesco Leonetti). The film has an eventual intertitle in between its two halves that make it explicit that the crow is a left-wing intellectual of the kind that roamed the earth before the death of Togliatti. Quite seriously, I had to look up who Togliatti was, having no clue who he could be. The film makes no effort to explain it (something I have an issue with) which makes the film feel more personal to Pasolini than any of his previous three films.
As previously stated, the film is presented in two halves. The first is primarily concerned with the crow's telling of the story of two religious brothers (played by Toto and Davoli as well) sent by Saint Francis of Assisi (Renato Montalbano) to convert the titular hawks and sparrows to belief in God. The two efforts are amusing in their own right with Brother Ciccillo kneeling in one spot for two separate years learning the languages of the two birds (the hawks do it vocally, the sparrows hop to communicate) with vines growing all over him while he kneels before the hawks and a festival to take advantage of his praying popping up around him for the sparrows. The tragedy is that despite the birds' conversion, they still retain their natural instincts, the hawks still hunting, killing, and eating the sparrows. Francis tells them to go off and continue to proselytize the birds until they change.
The second half shows the pecking order of Italian society with Toto being the middle class, demanding rents from his tenants while his own landlord demands payment from him, Toto offering similar excuses for being unable to pay as his own tenants had. These events the crow observes with witty detachment while also increasingly succumbing to the realization that nothing in human nature will change. There are also some events with a traveling circus, a birth, and a prostitute, Luna (Femi Benussi) that both father and son take into the fields before Toto has the idea, since they haven't eaten all day, of killing and eating the crow.
That ending, with the crow nothing but charred remains and dismembered feathers (in an image that looks like it exploded and wasn't eaten), especially after the newsreel footage of Togliatti's funeral (seriously, out of no where and I had to look it up), is obviously a reflection of some strain of thought Pasolini had in his head at the time. I think he saw himself in the crow, and the crow meeting this terrible ending while realizing that all of his words meant nothing because human nature continues is kind of depressing. Pasolini had some realization that his Marxist utopia was never going to come about because hawks will continue to eat sparrows no matter what. The powerful will always prey on the weak, and the death of Togliatti somehow was the trigger in his mind for how that was never going to change.
And yet, it's presented in this light comic form. A lot of the action is sped up, especially Toto's comic antics which make the comparisons to silent comics like Chaplin (Toto has a very similar walk to the Tramp) easier to make. The effervescent tone helps the quick film move from little event to little event, each one bearing some value upon the film's central point of a fallen world (like when Toto goes to defecate in a stranger's field, leading to an escalation of events that ends with them being shot at from the distant house as they jump around comically) that will never change.
So, it's lightly amusing. Toto gives an entertaining central performance while Ninetto Davoli has some fun physicality in his supporting role. The opening credits, sung, are actually quite funny. The parable of the hawks and the sparrows is fun. The ironic contrast between Toto's treatment of his tenants and his landowner's treatment of him is interesting. However, this is a deeply personal film for Pasolini, and he includes elements that seem designed to keep an audience at bay a bit. I would consider The Hawks and the Sparrows to be his least successful film so far, but it's still amusing and interesting at the same time.