I always meet the most desperate guys... and since they know I'm a soft touch, all the low-lifes come to me.
La commare secca is probably one of the most "minor" and consistently overlooked titles included in the Criterion Collection, and I don't think there's much I will say here to elevate the film to "mandatory viewing" status for those who have yet to make their acquaintance with the directorial debut of Bernardo Bertolucci. It's almost certainly on account of Bertolucci's later achievements, and its connection with Pier Paolo Pasolini, who wrote the original story, that this movie got the Criterion treatment - and as treatments go, it's practically a barebones release. Still, it's a credible entry, with enough going on with its visual and narrative elements to justify its inclusion and earn my appreciation after a couple of viewings.
The film opens with a sensitive guitar theme that we hear repeated several times as a lietmotif over the next 90 minutes. Scraps of yesterday's paper tossed off a bridge flutter alongside a highway where they happen to brush up against the corpse of a woman whose body was callously abandoned there by her murderer. La commare secca spends the rest of its time showing us the interrogation of possible witnesses and how their accounts of what happened the previous night lines up with flashback scenes of what the camera saw in recording their actual words and deeds. The contrasting recollections of flawed, unreliable witnesses routinely draws comparisons to Rashomon, which are reasonably fitting, even though Bertolucci's film spends almost no time raising the deeper philosophical issues dealt with in Kurosawa's pivotal and highly influential masterpiece. Nor had Bertolucci seen the film when he took on this effort, at age 21 while only in his second year of university studies. At the time, he was a bit of a prodigy, son of a famous Italian poet who was on his way to winning an national book award for his own volume of poetry and put at the helm of a feature destined to premier at the Venice Film Festival even though he'd only served as a crew assistant on one set - Pasolini's Accatone. I imagine his exceedingly good fortune generated a bit of resentment amongst his peers.
Our first witness is Canticchia, who gives the alias of Luiciano Maialetti (cribbed from a tombstone that comes to his memory.) He's 20 years old, an unemployed petty thief. While he claimed to spend the day looking for work, his true occupation consists of creeping around local outdoor passion pits with a couple of associates, looking for valuable merchandise he can steal from couples intent on lovemaking in secluded natural settings.
Attentive viewers are quickly impressed by the fluid camera work, long tracking and hand-held shots that change elevation, point up, point down as we're drawn into this exploration of Rome's scruffier side, the outskirts left undocumented in films like La dolce vita, but very much in keeping with the street culture that intrigued Pasolini in his earliest films and writings. By keeping his lens consistently on the move, Bertolucci deliberately parts ways with the flattened, fresco-inspired look that had already become his mentor Pasolini's signature "frontal" style after only one film, Accatone. Pasolini was filming Mamma Roma at the same time as La commare secca was shot,
A midday rainstorm breaks loose and signals the wake-up call for the unnamed woman who's destined to end her night dying face-down in the tall grass alongside the highway. She appears to be lonely and unloved, no apparent purpose to her life other than merely living one day to the next, resorting to prostitution as her most reliable means of survival. Plain in countenance, showing signs of aging, quietly anticipating the worst but pressing forward for lack of any better options, she silently goes about her preparations for another evening of street walking, washing her face, boiling coffee, applying a thin veneer of lipstick, pinning back her hair...
We return to see Luciano back on the prowl, after the rain has stopped. He foolishly tries to pilfer a radio but it's a trap - the big lug making out with his woman easily snags his wrist as Luciano makes the grab, and smacks him around a little, before relenting from the beat-down because the punk simply isn't worth his time. Meanwhile, his pals have abandoned him - one less share of loot to split from the day's haul. Luciano conveniently neglects to mention most of these details to the police, establishing the self-serving pattern of deceit and misdirection that all of us too freely resort to when pressed to account for ourselves. Those details he does manage to include get fuzzed over into more innocuous explanations - pitifully transparent deceits about meeting with a priest to get a letter of recommendation and finding a good job in a busy place that stayed open all night, when he really just whiled away the time wandering the streets after getting worked over by some hoodlums he ran into in the woods.
Next up: Bustelli, a three time loser who's tried to turn his life around after 17 trips to court to stand before a judge. He's kept it clean since his last release from prison, but now he's been implicated in the murder and has to account for his actions and whereabouts the previous day. He began it with a rendez-vous with his teenage girlfriend, a younger and more attractive alternative to Esperia, the pestering nag (and her mother) with whom he's currently living. Mother and daughter are a horrid pair, threatening to kill each other out of sheer pent-up frustration, but after the neighbors step in to calm things down (while Bustelli smugly weathers the storm), he and Esperia make a trip to shake down a debtor to collect some cash. Unsuccessful in that venture, they kidnap the woman's dog to hold ransom until they're paid in full. After the rainstorm, Bustelli and Esperia split up, supposedly "for good, this time" but who can really say. She draws a knife on him, inflicting a small wound on his cheek. He knocks her down, kicks her in the gut and runs away. Still, they don't seem quite ready to quit each other. Such is the course of parasitic codependency.
Next: Teodoro Cosentino, a young soldier off-duty but in uniform the previous day who whiled away the hours committing serial acts of what would be considered sexual harassment nowadays - accosting pretty women on the street, occasionally grabbing their arms or shoulders and prompting several of them to run away from his aggressive pursuit. He encounters a group of English-speaking tourists exploring the Colosseum, but parts ways with them to continue his solitary wanderings through rubble strewn alleys and a street corner lined with women offering up their bodies for rent. When the cloudburst arrives, Teodoro makes his way to the shelter of an overpass, where he's soon joined by that lineup of prostitutes, a few street urchins and even some animals, all seeking cover. Finally, he ends the day exhausted, having achieved nothing. He stops to rest on a park bench where he falls asleep, is spotted by other witnesses in the vicinity of the soon-to-be-dead hooker, and thus gets brought in for questioning.
Next we have Natalino, the man in clogs, a club worker who was spotted after the sleeping soldier Cosentino woke up running away from the scene of the crime. He spots a man with bleached hair, Bustelli I think it was, rummaging around in the bushes. He also mentions Cosentino asleep on the bench, approached by a pair of teenage boys: Francolicchio and Pipito.
Pipito is the last interview we get, as he's brought in for questioning after being reported for theft by a homosexual trolling the park looking to pick up teenage boys on that fateful night of the murder. Frantic due to his fear of what might happen to him now that he's in police custody, Pipito relates his previous days adventures, which began innocently enough with him and his companion meeting a couple of girls they routinely hung out with. After idling away some time listening to records and flirting in the apartment of an older female acquaintance, they make dinner plans for the next evening that require the guys to come up with 2000 lira on short notice. Unsure of where to get the money, they seize the opportunity to filch a gold lighter from the sleazy stranger they meet after dark, but that leads to all sorts of problems, including their observation of a pathetic homicide.
La comarre secca's most plaintively affecting sequence arrives near the end, when we witness the prostitute's murder as an act of the most mundane and senseless cruelty. Bertolucci shows a deft touch by portraying the deed without any garnish of melodrama or grandiosity; the woman is simply beat up and left behind by her killer, whose motives couldn't be more selfishly trivial. The reveal strips away any pretense of La commare secca being regarded as a whodunit thriller, since there's never any suspense or true confusion about the assailant's identity. Nor is there much focus on the procedural elements - we never see the face of the interrogators. The film's purpose is, as Bertolucci acknowledges in the brief interview that serves as the DVD's only supplement, to record "how the hours went by, how time consumed the hours of waiting before this crime occurred." The fact that the film is centered upon a crime can be attributed to the need of some kind of intense dramatic conflict that justifies the telling of the story and compels the audience to care about its outcome. But the lasting effect, assuming that it does leave an impact on the viewer (which is not a given, in light of the elliptical manner in which the narrative unfolds), is to return our attention to how we spend the hours of our own lives, and all the wasted opportunities and pointless distractions that dominate so much of human existence. The brute fact that things like murder, theft and betrayal take place ought to do more than strike a note of lament. More importantly, their occurrence should spur us to put more effort into affirming our fidelity and commitment to those we love and those whose lives we have the power to affect in positive ways.
I mentioned that the disc was very sparse in offering up the extras - not even a theatrical trailer is to be found. But this short clip, which looks to be a homemade edit of La commare secca's key moments, does a nice job introducing the film to first-time viewers and refreshing those who've seen it before.
Next: Vivre sa vie