Pier Paolo Pasolini | La ricotta / 1963

the cheese thief

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenwriter and director) La ricotta / 1963

 

     Pasolini’s 35-minute film La Ricotta appeared first as one of four films gathered as an omnibus production titled Ro.Go.Pa.G., the unmemorable title representing the names of the directors who make the movies included, Robert Rossellini (Illibatezza / Chastity), Jean-Luc Godard (Il nuovo mundo / The New World), Pasolini’s work, and Ugo Gregoretti (Il Pollo ruspante / Free Range Chicken).

     Of the four, Pasolini’s work was certainly the cause célèbre, if for no reason other than the director, accused of holding contempt for the state religion, was sentenced to four months in jail, which he avoided by paying a fine, the sentence later being declared void by an appeals court.

     But the film is also the most interesting of the four, even if they all bring up fascinating issues.

     Pasolini’s work is primarily a piece about movie-making, starring the great Orson Wells as the stand-in director for Pasolini himself, the huge-bodied American—in reality always seeking out roles to bring in some money in order to support his own directorial projects—somewhat smugly sitting back in utter disinterest in this particular film shoot, while quoting, at one point, from Pasolini’s diatribe against the Italian people themselves from his script from a year earlier, his 1962 film Mamma Roma.

    As with most movie-filming much of the time is spent with actors and extras standing around, finding ways to entertain themselves between the few takes from the actual movie in process. The movie being filmed, clearly a series of tableaux vivants and friezes of Christ’s Crucifixion, are filmed in color, while the rest of Pasolini’s picture, except for the opening credits, is shot in black-and-white. This obviously separates the cinematic art, which in this case is imitating the visual art of Renaissance painters such as Jacopo da Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, and the everyday occurrences going on around the around the artistic-cinematic evocation. If the film is intended to be sacred and even holy, the black-and-white sequences represent an insulting, vulgar, and at times even barbarous world which sustains the visionary expression.

     The major players of this work, the pretty boy who plays Christ, the divas (Laura Betti and Edmonda Aldini) who perform Mary and Mary Magdalene, a woman who stripteases on demand (Maria Bernardini), an interruptive journalist (Vittorio La Paglia), centurions, angels, dozens of young male hangers on and scores of extras, all seem to have poured out from a broken seam in a Federico Fellini film instead of feeling at home in the real world of Pasolini. Indeed, the journalist asks the director, in an obvious dig of the Italian master, what he thinks of the great Fellini, Welles answering, “He dances,” before possibly rethinking his description, but finally repeating it, “He dances.” The response suggests, clearly, that Fellini is more interested in entertaining—dancing like the boys doing the twist in the first scene—than in the “dance of the intellect.”

     In the vast amount of free time between moments of shooting that these figures have to themselves, they dance to the pop music of the day, eat, pet the dog, fret, plot, and even pick flowers.

     And then there is the extra who plays the good thief, Stracci (“rags,” played by Mario Cipriani), who is so poor that he is willing to accept the job just for the food he is fed. He eats, falls to sleep, and still wakes up hungry, realizing that his family, his wife and four sons, are visiting the nearby countryside that afternoon. With the free meal he is provided, he manages to feed them, but he goes hungry.

     Dressing up in one of the female costumes and wigs, he is able to get another serving of the ricotta cheese, and races off to hide it in a nearby cave. Speeding back to the set, he changes clothes and in a cartoon-like mania rushes back to the cave only to discover that the diva’s dog has consumed his lunch. It is enough to make a grown man break down into tears, just as we encounter when the journalist wanders by, soon after, catching the tearful giant now petting the dog he was about to strangle a moment before.

     When the journalist comments on how beautiful the dog is, Stracci tells him that it’s for sale, which the journalist is willing to buy if he’ll accept a check. Stracci, however, is willing to give the animal for only a thousand lira in cash. With that Stracci runs like the roadrunner to a countryside ricotta stand, buying up the entire offering of the fluffy white cheese made from goat or watery buffalo milk and good loaves of bread, rushing back to hide it again in the cave.  

      Meanwhile, as his family members sit it in the open grass enjoyably sharing the little sack of vittles with which their father originally provided, we observe the actor who plays the image of God pass by with a curious look in their direction. The street savvy eldest son rises, telling his mother he’s going on business, and that we may soon get a job as an extra. It is clear that by providing sex to the passing actor he may be able to serve the company in some minor capacity.

     A moment later, a couple of actors, one of them the handsome Christ of the movie, followed by cute boys also pass by, clearly moving in the direction of the little decayed structure in the near distance to have sex. The second son, better looking than the first, also rises, telling his mother that he too has a job to look after.

     The most beautiful of her sons, observing his brothers, still sits in the grass chewing the remains of his sandwich and cheese when suddenly out of the trees appears on the film’s stunningly beautiful angels. The youngest boy breaks into a full smile, as the camera pans to reveal once more the shooting location, where the call has just been made for the Good Thief to get “nailed up,” demanding Stracci to get hooked into his position on the cross. He rises, ready to take his position in the Passion. We don’t need to be told how the smiling beauty, Stracci’s third son, fares.

     Stracci is strapped to the cross, but the Diva, at that very moment, approaches the director demanding that her scene be shot immediately or she will leave. So Stracci, Christ, and the blasphemous thief are left on the ground to wait. Some of the crew members determine to entertain them as they wait—with another sort of dance—this gesture, in particular, meant to mock the immobile and now obviously suffering Stracci, his face seating in the sun, by asking a woman who obviously is sexually experienced with the crew to do a striptease.

     Refusing at first, she finally agrees to do it, raising Stracci’s heartbeat and other body parts as he frustratedly remains strapped into position, unable to move. Finally, the director issues the call for those on the crosses to be unstrapped, and Stracci rushes back to his cave to eat the cheese he has hidden there. As he gorges on this meal of his dreams, other cast members, who catch him the act, gradually bring him leftovers from the company table, sausages, liquor, cakes, and numerous other edibles to consume while they openly mock him for his enormous appetite, without realizing that in his poverty he has never had so much food set before him, let alone the opportunity to put it into his stomach.

     Stuffed, belching, and suffering from all the food, Stracci is called once again to strap up for the final shoot of the Passion. The crosses are moved up the hill and implanted, while below a crowd of well-dressed press members and the returned stars from the other scenes climb the hill, cameras snapping at their progress. The wind and lighting are checked out. The prompter, just to make sure that the dense-headed Stracci remembers his line, asks him to repeat it, which, despite his obvious indigestion, he successfully does. He is asked to repeat the line again, Stracci looking up to heaven with true conviction as he repeats:

 

                      Lord, remember me when Thou comest in Thy Kingdom!

 

     “Action” is finally called, as all wait for Stracci to repeat his line yet again.  But he only looks down as we have seen his face fall into place a moment ago. The director calls again for action, but Stracci does not respond. He is dead on the cross, killed not through suffering the torture of nails pounded in his hands and feet, but through the satiation of his lifelong starvation. His heart obviously could not handle the stress of all the food he has managed to stuff into the emptiness of his mouth.

     Christ has not been crucified, but the poor thief of cheese has, praying to God as he has left this earth. Isn’t this man as sacred as the man, the son of God, on the cross next to him? Is it sacrilegious to represent the good thief, in this case, as a figure equal to and perhaps just as important as the man who symbolizes the Christian faith? The Christ in the film is just an actor, while the thief, alas, is simply an ordinary man.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).