Porcile

Stars: Jean-Pierre Leaud (The 400 Blows, Day for Night, Masculine/Feminine), Pierre Clementi (The Conformist, Steppenwolf), Franco Citti (Oedipus Rex, The Arabian Nights). For a film about cannibalism and sexual congress with pigs, Porcile isn't half bad. It's all bad. Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Porcile--or "Pigsty"--is really two films grafted together. In the first, mostly wordless story, a medieval cannibal wanders around in a state of angst, chowing down on hapless travelers. Eventually caught, the cannibal exclaims: "I killed my father, I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy," referring to an experience that most of us are probably unfamiliar with. In the second, mostly actionless story, Julian (Jean-Pierre Leaud), the son of a bourgeois ex-Nazi industrialist, remains aloof from his confused fiancee Ida, while talking an endless stream of bored-intellectual-life-is-meaningless cant. A few flashes of cleverness in Pasolini's script can't absolve Porcile of being a slightly more adventurous but nevertheless tired take on the rich kid ennui theme. Ironically, this same Pasolini, an atheist, is the creator of what is arguably the best and most deeply spiritual story of Christ committed to film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Obviously that film and Porcile have virtually nothing in common. Audience: It's safe to say that most folks would be bored with the old bourgeois vs. proletariat flick in post-Communist 1993.