tlashop.com

Review

Love Meetings - This documentary is a gritty, cinema verité-style investigation of sex in Italy. The film includes appearances by author Alberto Moravia and noted psychologist Cesare Musatti. Pasolini appears as the interviewer and asks a wide range of individuals to share their tales of love -- including their thoughts on prostitution, homosexuality, marital and nonmarital liaisons.

Oedipus Rex - Filmed in and around an awesome, 15th-century adobe city in the Moroccan desert, Pasolini's version of the Oedipus legend retain's the basic elements of Sophocles' classic tragedy. A young man, abandoned at birth by his parents, is foretold of his doomed fate by an oracle; nontheless, he unknowingly murders his father and marries his mother. This tragic story of a man's intractable road to his destiny shimmers with lavish costumes, bloody sword fights, sun-drenched locales and expressive performances.

Porcile - Two contrasting stories are interwoven in a single narrative in Pasolini's biting satire on society's darker nature and the entrenched powers that be who are compelled to squash it. One tale, set in a barren, mountainous land in medieval times, features Clementi as a wandering soldier who descends into cannibalism, eventually recruiting a cult of followers who feed to the fiery volcano Mt. Etna the heads of their victims. The contrasting story, set in modern times, stars Léaud as the bourgeois son of a former Nazi, now a wealthy industrialist, who is politically and sexually confused -- so confused as to prefer the sexual companionship of his neighboring peasants' pigs to his attractive (and frustrated) fiancée. While not as explicitly outrageous as Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, this brutal allegory of savage "innocents" and their threat to organized society is intense and involving.

(Italian with English subtitles)