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La Commare secca [DVD]

Director : Bernardo Bertolucci

Screenplay : Bernardo Bertolucci & Sergio Citti (story by Pier Paolo Pasolini)

MPAA Rating : NR

Year of Release : 1962

Stars : Carlotta Barilli (Serenella), Lorenza Benedetti (Milly), Clorinda Celani (Soraya), Vincenzo Ciccora (Mayor), Alvaro D'Ercole (Francolicchio), Giancarlo De Rosa (Nino), Gabriella Giorgelli (Esperia), Romano Labate (Pipito), Alfredo Leggi (Bostelli), Santina Lisio (Esperia's mother), Allen Midgette (Teodoro), Ada Peragostini (Maria), Emy Rocci (Domenica), Wanda Rocci (Prostitute)

A little more than a decade before the notorious masterpiece Last Tango in Paris (1972) guaranteed his place in cinema history, Bernardo Bertolucci was a 20-year-old assistant to legendary writer/poet/filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. The next year, he was literally handed the reins of his directorial debut, La Commare secca (The Grim Reaper), which Pasolini had originally written and intended to direct, but set aside to concentrate on Mamma Roma (1962).

Working from Pasolini's story, Bertolucci (who had already published an award-winning book of poetry) and cowriter Sergio Citti (who had cowritten Pasolini's debut, 1961's Accattone) took the framework of a thriller and used it as a ploy to examine the lives of various characters in the lower rungs of the Italian social ladder. Thus, La Commare secca is less about its story than it is about the social environment of its characters. Surprisingly, this is what the film's backers wanted, as Accattone, the tragic and darkly social aware story of a pimp in Rome, had been a huge critical success and they wanted something else in the same vein.

The story's lynchpin is a dead prostitute, whose body is found by the banks of a river beneath a highway overpass. The police begin interviewing suspects, mainly people who were walking through a park near where the body was found the night before. Each character is brought in for an interview to dutifully relate what he did that day (although the stories that are told and the flashbacks we see don't always correspond). The interrogators remain completely off-screen, with only their voices directing the suspects, which puts the focus entirely on those being questioned. These include a hotheaded young thief (a street kid, a member of the "ragazzi di vita"), a lonely soldier, a former thief who now moochs off his vicious pimp of a girlfriend, a waiter, and a couple of randy teenagers who were picking up on girls in the park. Each of them stands in for some aspect of the lower stratum of postwar Italian society, particularly in the way they are all just barely scraping by.

In this respect, La Commare secca is an intriguing film, although it is never deeply engrossing. The characters are interesting enough, and Bertolucci's neorealist-inspired look at their lived experiences carries a charge of genuine authenticity. The use of nonprofessional actors and, even more importantly, location work, adds immensely to the film's sense of realism. However, unlike true neorealist films, Bertolucci makes some attention-grabbing aesthetic choices, particularly his use of a constantly roving camera (there are several long dolly shots that are particularly impressive given his lack of experience as a filmmaker). Bertolucci's lyrical sensibilities are most evident in the film's dreamlike opening imagery, in which bits of newspaper are blown off a highway overpass and mingle amid the blades of grass that partially hide the prostitute's body.

La Commare secca has been frequently compared to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), but the similarities of the two films are fleeting. They both use multiple narrators, but in Rashomon they were telling wildly conflicting versions of the same story, whereas in La Commare secca, each narrator's story is his own, and they overlap only in the park where the characters crossed paths. The film doesn't take as its subject the nature of truth itself; rather, it has a far less ambitious goal in documenting several briefly intersecting lives as a way of giving a brief portrait of a particular social class. In this sense, the film works quite well, although it falls far short of being gripping or emotionally powerful. More than anything, it is a curiosity piece, a first effort from an extraordinary filmmaker who would go on to much greater things.

Copyright ©2005 James Kendrick

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