La commare secca 

Bernardo Bertolucci (1962)

Bertolucci’s first feature, released when he was only twenty-two, is based on a short story by Pasolini.  The latter was busy making Mamma Roma so suggested to Antonio Cervi, who’d produced Accattone and bought the film rights to La commare secca, that he offer the piece to Bertolucci instead.   The body of a woman has been found close to the Tiber and the police are investigating her murder.  We watch a series of interviews (conducted by an unseen interrogator) with men who may or may not have been involved:  an unemployed youth who says he was meeting with priests at the time to try and get a reference for a job, although we see that he and his mates were actually trying to rob a couple; an ex-criminal; a soldier who tries unsuccessfully to pick up girls then falls asleep on a bench; another man, who wears white clogs that are as audible as they’re conspicuous; two teenage lads who meet first with their girlfriends then, later in the evening, are picked up by a homosexual, from whom they steal a cigarette lighter in the hope of selling it to raise the cash they’re desperate for.  Each episode centres on or leads the characters eventually to a wooded park.  Each is interrupted by a violent cloudburst (described in the BFI programme note and on Wikipedia as a ‘storm’ – which it doesn’t seem to be, although the noise of the rain has great impact).  At this point in each narrative, Bertolucci always returns to the woman who was murdered, a prostitute, whom we see in her bedsit, getting ready to go out for her last evening’s work.

The multiple and sometimes untruthful testimonies, recounted at first in parallel but increasingly connected, suggest Rashomon (as does the torrential rain).  The walks through the underbelly of Rome and the intertwining of borderline criminal and gay lifestyles there – the succession of people who need money or sex or both – might seem indelibly Pasolini.  And yet The Grim Reaper feels entirely original.   At the start of the film a car crosses a bridge and the current of air it causes blows bits of newspaper off the bridge; they drift down towards the corpse that’s revealed lying on the embankment below.  The image immediately establishes a sense of both randomness and predetermination, and Bertolucci holds those two things in tension throughout.   While the prostitute’s fate feels predestined, the several police interviews and accounts of events of the previous day imply that any of the men  could have committed the crime – and the interactions of some of them with other women that we see suggest that it’s merely accidental that another crime wasn’t committed, someone different killed.  (The ex-criminal, for example, has a relationship with his viciously hard-faced girlfriend, and her even harder-faced mother, which seems always to be on the verge of violence.)   The Grim Reaper has an almost documentary reality; Bertolucci manages at the same time to dramatise the characters and their situations powerfully.

There are visual and aural tensions too.  The chiaroscuro of the Roman side streets and their tunnels, the interplay of bright sunlight and shadows, is mesmerising.  (The film was shot in black and white, and photographed by Giovanni Narzisi.)   The silence of a hot summer day is given a beautifully sinister quality, which occasional snatches of pop music on transistor radios do little to dispel.  When the rain falls the sound is both alarming and relieving.   The calmest place in the story is the prostitute’s room, which seems cloistered and pacific compared with the various things going on outside it.  Barely out of his teens, Bertolucci had developed an extraordinary sense of rhythm:  the film moves fluidly and excitingly – especially in the sequence when the two teenage boys are running to escape the police and one of them dives into and swims across a lake.  (When he disappears from view under the water, you wonder for a moment if there’s been a new death to upstage the one at the centre of the film.)  The cast includes Vanda Rocci (the prostitute), Allen Midgette (the soldier), Alvaro d’Ercole and Romano Labate (the teenage boys) and Silvio Laurenzi (the gay picker-up, played in a way that looks nearly homophobic now although Laurenzi is physically convincing).  The intriguing music – which has a formal, antique elegance – is by Piero Picchioni and Carlo Rustichelli.

The BFI screened as an appetiser for The Grim Reaper Bertolucci’s contribution to the portmanteau film Amore e rabbia.  (The other contributors were Marco Bellocchio and Elda Tattoli (jointly), Godard, Carlo Lizzani and Pasolini.)   Agonia opens with a dying man being told by his nurse that a priest has arrived to administer the last rites.  The man complains that the priest is too early (‘He’s already been twice’) and puts his head under the covers.  At the very end of the piece, which runs some twenty-five minutes, his corpse is kitted out in a cardinal’s vestments.  Between the witty opening and the punchline, Agonia is like (perhaps is meant to be) a satire of a drama workshop, with a group of people in the room next door to the death chamber doing a lot of laborious movement, groaning, drooling, carrying the bare-bottomed dying man aloft etc.  (The latter turns out not to be very old at all; he’s played by Julian Beck, who was in his early forties at the time.)   If Agonia had been the piece of Bertolucci juvenilia it feels like, its inclusion in the programme would have been understandable – but it was made several years after the precociously brilliant main feature, in 1969.

Postscript   Sally described Agonia as ‘East 15 on a very bad day’ and was so irritated by the time The Grim Reaper started that she walked out after not very long, and missed a treat as a result.  I was doubly sorry she wasn’t there at the very end of the film because I’m pretty sure that, when we stayed in Rome in 2004, we regularly went through via Giulia en route to the bridge over the Tiber and this is where Bertolucci closes The Grim Reaper – his camera on a marble slab bearing the inscription ‘E già la Commaraccia secca de strada Giulia arza er rampino[1]’.  Sally would have known for certain.  The only consolation was that because Agonia was described as a ‘fragment’, it got me talking about Eliot and wondering if the two things were somehow connected:  once we’d got home and looked at ‘Fragment of a Prologue’ and ‘Fragment of an Agon’, it was clear they weren’t.  But I have this aberration to thank for the chance to reread ‘Sweeney Agonistes’.

10 April 2011

[1]  ‘And already the skinny mean lady of via Giulia lifts her hook’.