Gosh...Pier Paolo Pasolini really hated his father. He would call this his most autobiographical film, but unless he seriously dealt with an Oedipal Complex regarding his mother (which seems doubtful considering his homosexuality, but I'm not a psychologist steeped in the nonsense writings of Sigmund Freud), that autobiographical content seems relegated to the anachronistic bookends of this story of Ancient Greece. Essentially, Pasolini's Oedipus Rex ends up being two films in one: the bookends which directly deal with Pasolini's tumultuous inner life, and the large center, which is a straightforward telling of the story, largely as laid out by Sophocles (though not limited by the Greek rules of drama around place and time).
The opening is set in 1920s Italy with Laius (Luciano Bartoli) as a young Italian military officer whose wife, Jocasta (Silvana Mangano), has given birth to the baby Oedipus. None of these characters are named in the opening, by the way. The antagonism between Laius and Oedipus in this opening isn't about a prophecy of future patricide but out of jealousy over the lost love that Laius feels that Jocasta now directs towards the infant son. When he sends Oedipus off to die, it's done without Jocasta's knowledge, and that's when the film switches time to Ancient Greece (really filmed in Northern Africa) as the King of Thebes' servant takes the young prince into the mountains to die, saved by a servant of King Polybus (Ahmed Blehachmi) whose queen, Merope (Alida Valli), takes him willingly into her home as her own son. Grown up, Oedipus (now played by Franco Citti), is beset by dreams and goes to see the Oracle of Delphi who tells him the prophecy of murdering his father and bedding his mother. Thinking that Polybus and Merope are his real parents, he refuses to go back to Corinth, heading towards Thebes where he meets Laius on the road, killing him and his party, and making it to Thebes where he kills the Sphinx plaguing the city, gaining the right to marry Jocasta.
It's really a straightforward telling of the background of the Oedipal story. The play by Sophocles was limited by the rules of time and place (also action) as laid out by Plato in Poetics, and it's really limited to the twenty-four hour period where Oedipus has to deal with the curse on Thebes, only able to be lifted by the death or exile of the man who killed Laius. It's an investigation done through witness testimony that leads Oedipus to realize his own guilt that seems to obvious on its face but he was unwilling to see because it meant that he would have to give up everything, that he was living a terrible lie, and that the prophecy that he had tried to avoid he had fulfilled in that attempt.
All of that is captured here by Pasolini, though he stretches time and action to happen longer than a mere day with events occurring outside of the immediate vicinity of the court. One of the things that I've grown to really appreciate about Pasolini is his propensity to simply filming outside. It's amazing how much better things can look when you film in front of a thousand year old stone structure rather than stretching a miniscule budget to try and build something approximating it. It's amazing how great a frame can look when one goes outside to take in the countryside with one's subject at the center of it all. It was obvious in The Gospel According to Matthew that Pasolini knew that if he was going to film outside in the country, he was going to take full advantage of it visually, but it's been clear from his first film, Accattone, limited to the confines of Roman streets, that he wanted to bring in more than just his actors into focus. Here, using color for the first time, Pasolini's frame is bursting with detail in pleasing compositions in exotic locales. It's a great looking film.
The investigation plays out without much variation from Sophocles' play. Witnesses are brought in who reveal little bits of information about the murder of Laius on the road, Oedipus refuses to make the logical connections himself, requiring more detail from more witnesses before he can come to accept it himself. Jocasta figures it along with him, taking extreme measures to clear herself of the incestuous situation she's been in for more than a decade, and Oedipus takes his famous last measure to rob himself of sight for what he'd done.
And then the film jumps time again to contemporary Rome where a blind Oedipus (no longer with gouged out eyes, simply blinded some other way) is led around to play his flute by Angelo (Ninetto Davoli), the modern version of the messenger who greeted Oedipus to Thebes. Pasolini repeats something he did in The Hawks and the Sparrows by including some real-world footage, this time of striking workers in Italy, a sight that, while Oedipus can't see it, frightens him.
If we take Pasolini's word that the film is autobiographical, then I think I have to take this final section in a similar way as the finale to The Hawks and the Sparrows, meaning that it's a reflection of a Marxist thinker who sees the world he had wanted to change changing in ways that he didn't expect, leaving his ideology behind (to paraphrase the crow in the previous film). How this actually relates to the story of Oedipus Rex, though, is beyond me, making me feel like the bookends and the actual meat of the film are essentially two different works sandwiched together, Pasolini taking a story with passing direct relation to his own life and using the bookends to make it more self-reflective than the actual story of Oedipus.
I think that contrast is my central issue with the film. I think it's overall a good film, it's just that these three sections clash against each other. The story of Oedipus is well-told with beautiful cinematography. The bookends are interesting regarding the biography of Pasolini (though the opening works better than the ending), but they seem only tangentially related to the actual tale of Oedipus.
So, it's a good film that Pasolini bent towards himself in a way that doesn't mess with the actual story, leaving that largely alone, but framing in a way that's intensely personal, even if it doesn't quite fit. Well, it's certainly better than a bad take.
