Criterion does a wonderful job in their DVD transfers, and I don’t need to talk up all the fine films they rerelease (even if their tastes tend more toward the cultish than mine). But they’ve just put out Bertolucci’s first feature, La Commare Secca/The Grim Reaper, which is just fantastic. Based on a Pasolini story, the film is a fortuitous combination of the latter’s Marxist analysis and queer/subproletarian aesthetic with Bertolucci’s synthesis of humanist and modernist traditions in filmmaking. The result is one of the best examples of what the cinema could and did achieve in the heady days of the early 60s.
The plot is simple enough: a prostitute is murdered in a Roman park and as the police interrogate suspects, the narrative unfolds in flashback. In doing so, the film shares a modernist narration structure similar to Rashomon — the same story is told from multiple perspectives, often showing the narrator to be duplicitous or just unobservant. But rather than a closed rejection of truth proper, the overlapping perspectives merely situate their tellers socially. Furthermore, the camera doesn’t replicate their perspectives but is interplay with them. It’s a more open narrative structure despite the literary tidiness of its construction. At the same time, the pace and scope of the film is hardly grand at all, but takes place through careful accumulation of observation and subtle narrative development. In that sense it’s similar to the quieter narrative eye of Cleo from 5 to 7.
I’m not sure how La Commare Secca was received upon release, but years of unavailability in this country have pushed it out of the cinephile canon. Though perhaps Criterion are canon-maintainers in their own right, an institution as powerful as film societies and film-studies academics were in their day.
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