'Cinema
Doing it to death
Duncan Fallowell Bawdy Tales Director: Sergio Citti Writer: Pier Pasolini 'X' London Pavilion (82 minutes)
Escort Girls Director: Donovan Winter 'X' Classic, Charing Cross Road (95 minutes)
It seems that great names are not what they were. Several months ago Bunuel was credited with having written a most embarrassingly scripted film called The Monk. Then Christopher Isherwood did his bit for Frankenstein. To those of us who consider him a literatus to be reckoned with the results were.a small tragedy. And now Pasolini is given top credit on Bawdy Tales, also as a writer. That the script is the weakest component of the picture will not come as a surprise if you bear in mind that this is always the case with Italian films. Witness Fellini's which rely on Latin hysteria for their drama, the motions of spaghetti-ridden bowels for their humour, and vacuous rhetoric for their style, so that intelligent pleasure is strictly a result of his theatrical flair. It's all in the visuals., as they say. Similarly with Pasolini. He is assuredly no writer. Making considerable allowances for the drawbacks of translation, these anecdotes are the feeblest exercises in the Boccaccio genre. Yes, the great Decameron saga rolls on out of sheer blind persistence, even though the horse was flogged
to
death years ago. Bawdy Tales was directed bY
Sergio Citti who worked as Pasolini's assistant on the original
Decameron, a delicious film in itself which spawned a whole string of. inept follow-ups of which this is the most recent and, let me add, the most inept. Citti has also learn from his artistic godfather how to fill a frame very prettily arld fortunately the Italians are good.looking animals quite often. This means that when the squawking and jabbering become too much you can turn off your ears and jtiSt watch them flopping around in the hay. The tales themselves are the familiar potch of great ladies and village boys, blasphemous priests, hedonistic popes (do they reallY grow on trees?) and irregular Dionysian behaviour dedicated to showing us what an amusing, rotten, fruity lot they were. And Yet the structure of the pieces is so aimless, the point so unapparernt dtheantouone rs
denouements
a choked axeman at the British Board for making so few concessions to English purity. Whatever the reasons, there remains sufficient nakedness and let's pretend sex to entice salivary filmgoers seeking a touch of the erotic, something Pasolini's hand invariably inspires. Despite its formal Obfuscating shoddiness the film raises the aromas of real sensuality and these just about make it into the front stalls. Donovan Winter has produced, 'written and directed a parallel film in the British manner. Apparently there was a bother over the title. Mr Winter wanted it to be called 'Only The Lonely' or 'All Lovers Are Strangers', surely two rather mawkish suggestions, but the distributors decided on Escort Girls and put it on at the Classic in Charing Cross RDad, a choice of theatre which seems more or less appropriate to me, although the title is definitely sleading in one respect since we Lu• ilow the trails of escorts both female and male. One can understand something of Mr Winter's Perturbation . This may not be a Withering triumph of cinematic art but it is certainly a sight better than Most of the films into whose bag it has been put. If it lacks the ocular refulgence of Citti it makes up for it in the comprehensibility of its narrative. The stories do have Point, not much perhaps but what there is you do get, and it does add uPto more than an excuse for titillation. Also I chuckled a lot, if that is any recommendation. Hay 8 read that it was made for '41, 5' 000, one's basic response is 'noW?' For a 'soft trade' film it is remarkably full.
Previous page
