Saltburn (2023)

There is much to love about Saltburn, like Emerald Fennell's previous feature, Promising Young Woman, this movie is glossy and bright, with witty barbs and humorous scenarios, but Saltburn is much better than PYW, primarily because it is having a lot more fun. Paradoxically – since Saltburn is about very, very wealthy people – this film is a good deal less smug than Fennell's first feature. Or rather, to be smug in Saltburn is to ask to be punished. The most smug person in the room is always Farleigh, and the film never, ever takes Farleigh's side.

I shouldn't spend a ton of time comparing Saltburn to PYW because it isn't really fair, but I will make one more point of comparison and then move on. One thing I loved about Saltburn is that it is always on the main character's side. We always follow Oliver, even when he's being very, very strange. This is not true of PYW, which often took the point of view of the men who were troubled by the main character's strange behavior. But Saltburn's central character is a very strange dude. In fact, the film begins with a question. Was I in love with him? Did I love him? It's a mystery the movie continues to play with. How does Oliver feel about Felix? Oliver does some truly baffling things, so much so that at times I was squealing and squirming in the theatre. Like oh my god the bathwater. And the cunnilingus. So much good, weird stuff. I loved every bit of this weirdness. But even when the camera watches Oliver watch Felix have sex with a girl in his dormitory, the camera is on Oliver's side. We watch with him. We never see Oliver from anyone else's perspective, except (very briefly) when Farleigh sees Oliver and Venetia from the window.

One of the great things about this tactic on Fennell's part is that Oliver himself remains a social mystery. How does everyone else feel about Oliver? It is actually very difficult to answer this question because the film doesn't care; Saltburn is interested in how Oliver feels about how everyone feels about Oliver, but the movie spends almost no time judging Oliver from the perspective of the family. Even when Ollie wears out his welcome with Sir James and we know that Sir James wants Oliver to leave, Saltburn doesn't take Sir James's side. We're on Ollie's side, stubbornly refusing to leave Saltburn until we get our payoff.

The next James Bond?

This movie is cast beautifully. Barry Keoghan is a perfect star. Carey Mulligan is pitch perfect in her small, weird, depressive part. Jacob Elordi is gorgeous (although to my mind slightly lacking in power – he's never, for example, quite as awesome as Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley), and Richard E. Grant is an utter delight. But for me the real revelation is Rosamund Pike. She tears into this fucking role and is unstoppably funny. She's just truly genius and deserves an Oscar nomination for this part. The movie is not Oscar stuff, I don't think, so I am not sure she can score a nomination. I will beat this drum, though. She definitely deserves it.

The other intriguing thing about Saltburn is the way it sort of riffs off of Pasolini's very sexy 1968 film Teorema. Saltburn doesn't have the intriguing spiritual elements of Pasolini's movie, but Oliver does seem to have a kind of pansexual power over the people in the house, and this definitely made me think of the way Terence Stamp worked through every family member, seducing each one in turn. 

Anyway, Saltburn is wacky and weird and a ton of fun. For me, when I try to think about Oliver and who he is I think the film does a great job of moving away from him as a sort of symbol or icon. One might see Ollie as a kind of symbol of ancient necessity or something (the way Keoghan's part worked in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, for example), but Fennell's characters are surprisingly rich and complex here. Even the film's villains – Farleigh and Elspeth and Sir James and Felix and Venetia – are interesting and complicated; they're not easy symbols or shallow figures created to make a point. Everyone feels full and fascinating. My explanation for all of Ollie's behavior is not that he loved him, so much as, perhaps, he needed to consume these people like a sort of ancient cannibalism or vampirism (he says that he is a vampire, after all), in order that he might be able to become them. He's a Tom Ripley for 2023, sexy and lonely and completely insane. In any case, I had a great time.

Flesh + Blood (1985)

I like Paul Verhoeven’s weird portraits of people who don’t really know what they want and are pulled in multiple directions. His films are always sexy, always violent, and always a little gross. This is a story set in medieval times, but it’s no Decameron. This is a joyously grim and totally perverse tale that has a lot more in common with Verhoeven's earlier Spetters than it does with Pasolini's much more celebratory version of the middle ages.

Caravaggio (1986)

Whoa whoa whoa. I loved Caravaggio. It feels like an extraordinary step from Sebastiane to this, but Caravaggio is brilliant. Its art direction and mood feel like the Pasolini of The Decameron and Arabian Nights, but it’s also modern in interesting ways and the acting is really wonderful.

Pasolini's Canterbury Tales

Pasolini's I Racconti di Canterbury (1972) is a kind of continuation of his Decameron (1971) and prefigures his Arabian Knights (1974). I loved both of those movies, and I think part of my problem with Canterbury is that it doesn't really do anything new with the formula. Mind you, I saw Arabian Nights before I saw Canterbury Tales, and I might have felt differently about that movie if I had seen that third, but I don't think so. There's something... I don't know... disconnected about this one in comparison with the other two. We never spend enough time with any one story to really connect with the characters.

Or maybe it's the dubbing. I know this is very typical of Italian films from this period, but it's truly egregious here. Hugh Griffith and many other actors are obviously speaking English, but their voices come out speaking a decidedly disconnected Italian. Sometimes the mood of the words doesn't even match what the actors are doing on the screen. I don't know. It really bugged me.

Ninetto Davoli's appearance is a high point of the film, of course, and there are plenty of really delightful sequences, so I am not really complaining, and I liked it well enough. I just loved The Decameron and Arabian Nights so much, and this one is not as good.

The movie's final sequence, though, in which a greedy monk is led into Hell and meets the devil, who shits out other friars, is hilarious, absurd, and delightful. It's a wonderfully sacrilegious way to end the movie and a stark contrast to the beautifully sacred ending to The Decameron.

Arabian Nights (Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte)

I loved Pasolini's Decameron, and I loved this adaptation of the Thousand and One Nights. I know that Arabian Nights and The Decameron are allegedly both supposed to part of some "trilogy of life". I put no stock in that at all, but this film is very similar in form to The Decameron, and I loved it for that. This is a sexy, romantic, delightful romp. With its scenes of homosexuality, explicit heterosexual sex, and erect penises, Arabian Nights was, unsurprisingly, not released in the United States until much later. 

It's quite clear, though, that Pasolini – with this film and with the Decameron – is interested in sex as something unsullied and pure, something that cultures try to disrupt and destroy. For him, these films that adapt stories from the medieval period are really showing us this purity.

Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte is also notable for the way it treats Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini's longtime lover. This was their final film together, and Davoli left Pasolini to go marry a woman. In the Mille e Una Notte, Davoli's character is violently punished for his faithlessness and callousness.

Teorema (1968)

I quite liked this strange allegorical film. I didn't like it as allegory, though. 

Like, once I try to make Teorema map directly onto class struggle or whatever it's supposed to be trying to say, I like the film a little bit less. 

But as stories go, this is very intriguing and enjoyable.

Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (1964)

I was really taken with Pasolini's Decameron, which I saw for the first time last month, and since then I have been interested to see more of his work. The Criterion Channel has cycled off the three Pasolini films they were showing, so I decided to watch The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which is on Amazon Prime at the moment.

 It's an epic. It's exquisitely done. It's a cast of hundreds (including, for some reason, Giorgio Agamben), and the art direction is extraordinary. But... well, it's still the story of Christ, and the storytelling here feels disjointed and disconnected, as if Christ's life is a series of tales rather than a single story (which of course it is, but this doesn't make for the best narrative feature). I didn't enjoy this as much as I wanted to.

Also, the homoeroticism promised by the poster (and, indeed, by Pasolini's life) comes to naught. This film is not the least bit erotic, even with the beautiful Enrique Irazoqui in the main role.

The Decameron

Il Decameron is delightful. Totally fun and very much captures the spirit of playfulness and cleverness that is such a hallmark of Boccaccio's great novel. (I adore this novel, for the record. It's enormously long and I couldn't put it down!) Pasolini's film is sexy and fun, and even though I saw it more than a week ago, I haven't stopped thinking about it. I watched it on the Criterion Channel ... and I had meant also to watch Pasolini's Canterbury Tales, but I ran out of time and now it's no longer playing on the channel. Guess I'll catch the Chaucer one some other time.