A Weak Italian Trio

...On Screen A WEAK ITALIAN TRIO BY ROBERT ASAHINA The late Pier Paolo Pasolini's Said, 120 Days of Sodom, set in the Fascist Republic of Salo in 1943, was banned in Italy and shown under restricted conditions in France...

...Bertolucci claimed in an interview that his reason for choosing actors from different countries-despite the language problems, technical difficulties and incongruities of physical appearance (imagine casting Sterling Hayden as Olmo's father...

...The father bursts into a school-house, demands the release of 6-year-old Gavino (Fabrizio Forte)-"He's my property...

...What emerges is a troop train transporting soldiers returning from the front-among them Olmo as a young man-after the armistice ending World War I. Although that transition is father striking in a strictly formal sense, the peasant rebellion has been precipitously dropped and we never find out what happened in the intervening dozen years...

...For all the characters, including those noble revolutionary peasants, look like fools, spear carriers in a loony comic opera...

...In being politically negligible, it is similar to two other Italian imports at the festival-paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Padre Padrone, and Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900...

...He is brutally beaten for the slightest mistake or unintended offense to Signor Ledda's rigid code of behavior...

...Either way, the scene flatly contradicts others in the movie...

...He wanted to make it a "people's movie" that would communicate his revolutionary message to mass audiences in several countries...

...And exactly what is his message...

...But there are many wonderful individual moments in the film...

...This achievement was all the more noteworthy because Padre Padrone was originally produced as a two-part television feature, The film, an adaptation of the autobiography of Gavino Ledda, begins with one of the neatest framing sequences in recent memory...

...At the end of the film, Gavino understands with pity and anguish that his father, too, has been the victim of a brutalizing and anachronistic system...

...His awakening, captured dramatically in the meeting with the accordion player, is not adequately followed through...

...was to give the film a truly international appeal...

...The real-life Ledda, 36 years old, explains on camera that what follows is the true story of his growing up...

...Next to such confused but imaginative praise, any criticism of 1900 is likely to seem uninspired, if not dull...

...Incredibly enough, this tiresome epic is a short version of the 5-hour, 20-minute spectacular that caused much controversy at Cannes in 1976...

...A shorter version (3 hours and 15 minutes) was also made, and for a year Bertolucci, producer Alberto Grimaldi and Paramount Pictures, his American distributor, quarreled about which of the three should be shown in the States...

...Risking his father's wrath, he slaughters two sheep in exchange for the instrument, and thus acquires his first contact with the outside world...

...The movie is out of proportion in another respect, too: Compared to the amount of time spent covering Gavino's state of servility, his enlightenment takes place in a flash...

...One sequence begins with a train carrying striking farm workers, including the boy Olmo, entering a dark tunnel...

...Normal individuals, however, appreciate coherence and consistency...

...Kael has already gone to bat for his latest film, 1900: "The film is appalling, but it has the grandeur of a classic visionary folly...

...When he is 20, illiterate and uncivilized, Gavino (now played by Saverio Marconi) hears an itinerant carnival accordionist playing a Strauss waltz...

...Pasolini is simply too "elegant" to hate-or, in fact, to manifest feeling of any kind (a frigidity shared by Robert Bresson, who has long since detached himself from anything besides his own artistry...

...and the Fascists, whom the padrones allow to rise to power, are all sadistic child molesters (particularly Attila, grotesquely overplayed by Donald Sutherland...

...It's so nice here," she tells him, "the smell of your supper, the way you are all together, your mother asleep by the fire...

...First, while relatively modest in depicting more or less conventional (oral and anal) sexual acts, Said is painfully explicit in areas previously unexplored on American screens-specifically, urination, defecation and sexual torture...

...The two young boys masturbate together, so naturally when they are older, they share a whore together-simultaneously, in what must be the most embarrassing nude scene ever effected...

...In one scene, as Gavino is quietly practicing his vocabulary at dawn in a lavatory stall, gradually his voice begins to blend with the growing sounds around him of more men beginning their daily routines...

...The narrative spans two wars and 45 years, ending with the downfall of the padrone and the short-lived peasant uprising on Liberation Day in 1945...

...Actually, they are crude sexual stereotypes that make a mockery of his politics...

...He professes to be a Communist, but the distribution of 1900 probably poses a greater threat to the spread of international Communism than the exposure of the Gulag Archipelago...

...Frustrated in his attempt to leave Sardinia-and the iron grip of his master-as an emigrant laborer, he enlists in the Army, where he is ridiculed for his native dialect and ignorance...

...Integral or not, the screen hasn't witnessed such lunacy as 1900 since Cecil B. De Mille...

...Kael and I and other critics, it should be noted, saw the picture free of charge...

...Bertolucci is decidedly not normal...

...Said, in short, really has very little intelligent to say about either sex or politics...

...With Kauffmann, I cannot help concluding that Pasolini was less interested in the overall point of his adaptation (if there was any) than in its obscene details...

...One (Alfredo, played by Robert De Niro) grows up to be the oppressor, the padrone of the Berlinghieri estate...

...With such an inhuman detachment from inhumanly indecent acts, what Said exhibits most is an extreme preciosity...

...Perhaps no contemporary director has benefitted more from muddled theorizing than Bernardo Berto-lucci...

...The excessively tyrannical father, meanwhile, hardly seems real...

...To be sure, this movie is indeed foolish on a grand scale-but that is in no way meant to suggest that it is worth seeing...

...It is difficult to say...

...Being a full-fledged pseudointellec-mal, Bertolucci has probably convinced himself that his characterizations draw equally upon Freud and Marx...

...This one is less real because it's more perfect...

...this year its status was uncertain, and two slots at the festival had to be kept open for it...

...At one point, Ada goes slumming and visits Olmo's home...

...But showings were sold out in advance, even though the festival advertising did not mention the film by name...

...The Taviani brothers' movie, still awaiting general release in the U.S., was the winner of the Golden Palm for Best Film at Cannes this year and of the International Critics' Prize-the first picture ever to win both...

...It is hard for me to see what all ihe fuss was about: If 1900 were an hour longer or an hour shorter, it would still be lousy...

...The whole structure serves as a sort of fancy wrapping for the horrible content that is Sade's contribution...

...Yet the preeminence of Gavino has the effect of seriously unbalancing the narrative for the first half of the film...

...the result is simply a mess that manages to be worse than the normally poor audio quality of most Italian films...

...Soon he earns a high school diploma and then a university degree in, of all things, linguistics (he specializes in Sardinian speech...

...But I do not think the reason for this is, as he suggests, that before Pasolini's death in 1975 (he was murdered by a young man, presumably his lover), his homosexuality and radical politics were warped by alienation into an impotent rage against society...

...and because we are introduced to few other characters, we cannot tell whether he is representative or abnormal in his cruel dominance...

...Whatever the case, Bertolucci's casting was a disaster in another respect: The all-star international players (Italian, French and American) required a combination of live sound, postsynchronization and dubbing...

...The Tavianis also possess the characteristically Italian flair for the visual-almost painterlyqualities of the cinema...

...Be warned that paying $4 for the dubious privilege of enduring 1900's 4 hours and 5 minutes of "classic visionary folly" is about as foolish an act as I can think of...

...and leads the terrified boy off to the mountains to tend sheep...

...and this estheticism was evidence of self-indulgence rather than estrangement...

...Not only is the basic idea exceedingly trite, but Bertolucci (who wrote the screenplay with Franco Arcalli and Giuseppe Bertolucci) dredges up every conceivable cliche to fill the four hours...

...Their feud, just recently resolved, kept 1900 out of the 1976 New York Film Festival...

...The sight of Depardieu and De Niro Hopping amund is a truly sickening spectacle...

...Kael herself, his most ardent admirer, identifies him as a member of the "lunatic tradition that is quite probably integral to the nature of movies...

...As the oldest son, the young Gavino must become virtually a servant, and sacrifice his education and future to help support what will be a large family...

...I want to convey a sense of elegance and precision, of irreality...

...A Marxist can live with contradictions-although in Bertolucci's case, they probably arise less from ideology than from sloppiness, in both conception and execution...

...And since the characterization of Gavino is so compelling-having the additional dramatic advantage of being true-we inevitably see the story in personal rather than social or political terms...

...Pauline Kael's notorious review of Last Tango in Paris was merely the most extreme example of the kind of uncritical criticism that greets his every endeavor...

...It is not...

...The story goes like this: Two babies are born at the turn of the century (thus the film's title...

...For 14 years, Gavino lives isolated with his father in the rugged mountains of Sardinia...

...It is clear that the Tavianis have a proper Socialistic contempt for the age-old Italian system of patriarchy...

...It is absolutely impossible to determine whether Bertolucci intended this patronizing drivel to be taken seriously, or was trying to satirize intellectual sentimentality toward the peasantry...

...Bertolucci's simpleminded sexual reductionism goes much farther than that of his mentor, Pasolini, who at least recognized-as is apparent even in Said-that Fascism is concerned with power, not simply erversion...

...Pasolini's sensibility, I believe, became its own primary object...

...I am not using our modern way of understanding things emotionally," Pasolini declared in an interview...

...Possibly this gap in the story line stems from Bertolucci's having actors to play Olmo as a boy and a man, but not as an adolescent...

...You get the idea-ben Hur in modern drag, or Start the Revolution Without Me in Italy instead of France...

...All three, indeed, underscore the point that although Italian filmmakers seem to share a commitment to Leftism, this tends to be so fuzzy in their films, it is generally wisest to "factor out" ideology as a relevant aspect of their works...

...The way New York has casually accepted Pasolini's graphically detailed adaptation of an infamous book by history's most notorious pornogra-pher is remarkable in two respects...

...One moment he is stammering his native dialect in the Army, the next moment he is reading Latin...

...I would look, instead, to the tension in Said between Sade's material and Pasolini's technique, between the disgusting content and the stern formalism of its expression...

...Second, as Stanley Kauffmann has noted, this kind of tolerance undermines the film's raison d'etre...

...the aristocrats are ei-tner effete (Alfredo), virginal (Ada, who becomes Alfredo's wife, listlessly portrayed by Dominique Sanda) or homosexual (Alfredo's uncle Ottavio, played by Werner Bruhns...

...Upon returning to his village and family, Gavino realizes his success can be established there only by winning a physical battle with his father-who suffers an abject and humiliating defeat...

...Next to it, all the other new movies are like something you hold at the end of a toothpick...

...Following its American premiere at last month's 15th New York Film Festival, however, Said has begun a regular engagement in Manhattan-not in the pits of 42nd Street, where many detractors thought it belonged, but on fashionable 57th Street, where it appears to have raised scarcely an eyebrow...

...Forcing reviewers to pay to see films might make them somewhat stingier with their praise...

...As if his muddleheadedness and primitive inventiveness were not enough, Bertolucci leaves gigantic holes in the narrative...

...After that, despite the older man's rapidly growing fear and anger, there is no stopping Gavino's quest for knowledge...

...The peasants are all robust in their sexuality...

...When Sade's notions lose their power to shock, or are no longer taken seriously, they also lose their political and moral significance...

...While Gavino's father washes his hands in the kitchen sink, a lifetime of manual labor is caught in the splashes of dirty water on the wall...

...De Niro, who was apparently recorded live for the American version, sounds particularly stupid with his lilting Lower East Side inflections-especially in contrast with the non-English speaking cast, whose voices sound hollow and artificial...

...That New York audiences can calmly tolerate Pasolini's cinematic excess offers compelling testimony about a liberal society's power to accomodate (or inability to resist) the most extreme repudiations of its own underlying values, like decency...

...He then hands a large walking stick to Omero Antonutti, the actor who plays his father, and the narrative begins...

...Nonetheless, Padre Padrone emerges as a curiously apolitical film: The struggle personified by the elder and the younger Ledda is between the ancient and the modern, the father figure and the son-not between any competing modern ideologies...

...the other (Olmo, played by Gerard De-pardieu) grows up to be the oppressed, a peasant on the estate...