John Sharpe drives repeatedly round a ring road all day musing on his wife, his baby son, his business, his upbringing, his family, and the GM trials that his company are undertaking. There is close detail about potatoes, childbirth and sex. Sharpe thinks about various characters which tells us something about them but, unlike the characterizations and minute observation evident throughout In The Place of Fallen Leaves, I am left feeling I do not know these people, nor does Sharpe, and nor does he know himself. I warm to none of them. There are three occasions when he plainly contradicts himself; he says he went to a therapist, then says he made it up; he says he met his wife hitchhiking, then says he met her playing football; says she fell head over heels for him, then that she settled for him after loving someone else more deeply. These deliberate contradictions are strangely psychotic and disturbing. Sharpe is left to continue on his way.
Accatone! (1961) is the first film by director Piers Paulo Pasolini and re-relased as part of a box set of his work. Accatone! features a pitiless, self-serving, manipulative young pimp living in the slums and rubble of Rome, whose lassitude is infectious. Images of his death recur throughout the film and he seems barely living. The exclamation mark in the title may be there to try and wake him up. Pasolini shot the film on the streets, using the people he found there rather than professional actors. The effect is a slow moving realism which casts the viewer as reluctant voyeur; it is impossible to gain any distance from the unrelenting sadism of hollow machismo. Seeing this film fifty years after it was made, the misogyny in this film is deeply disturbing; women are either Madonna, virgin or whore. Accatone says prostitution is ‘a mother’s situation’ which provides the mixed message that it’s selfless and necessary for survival, yet he and his friends view whores as trash; to...
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