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Movies Forum Index » International Movies Forum » REVIEW: NON SI SEVIZIA UN PAPERINO (72) - very long
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| Iain Mclachlan |
 Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2003 3:41 am |
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NON SI SEVIZIA UN PAPERINO
(Italy 1972)
Alternate Titles: FANATISMO; DON'T TORTURE THE DUCKLING.
RT: 106mins.
Pro Co: Medusa Cinematografica.
Dir: Lucio Fulci;
Pros: Felice Calaiacono, Franco Puccioni;
Wrs: Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti, Gianfranco Clerici; st: Lucio Fulci,
Robert Gianviti;
Exec Pro: Renato Laboni.
Phot: Sergio D'Ofizi;
Film Ed: Ornella Micheli;
Mus: Riz Ortolani;
Art Dir: Pierluigi Basile.
SFX: Gianetto De Rossi.
Cast: Florinda Bolkan, Babara Bouchet, Tomas Milian, Irene Papas, Marc
Porel, George Wilson, Vito Passeri, Aldo Campodifiori, Ugo D'Alessio,
Virginio Gazzolo.
INTRODUCTION
Although he had been working steadily as a director in the Italian film
industry since the end of the 1950s, Lucio Fulci did not really attract
international attention until the late 1970s with a series of gory gothic
horror movies that began with the living dead epic Zombi 2 (79), intended as
a rip-off of George A. Romero's hit Dawn of the Dead (7 , known as Zombie
in most European markets but proving to be highly regarded in its own right.
Over the next three years Fulci followed these up with similarly graphic
productions like L'Aldila. Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero (both 81) and
Manhattan Baby (82). These films were often championed by genre-specific
publications like Midi-Minuit, Fangoria and Starburst, as well as the then
burgeoning small press market, thus helping establish the filmmaker one of
the most instantly recognisable names created in the age of the home video
market.
The downside of all this attention was that interest in Fulci's career
tended to concentrate, with a few exceptions, on half a dozen movies over a
three year period, thus neglecting a large portion of his overall career.
This has meant that a number of potentially interesting works from the
director have been overlooked, particularly early forays into westerns,
horror and gialli, such as this 1972 production.
SYNOPSIS
A massive new motorway passes through a remote valley in Southern Italy,
bypassing a small village. On a hillside next to the road, a woman is seen
furtively digging at the ground. Soon, it becomes apparent that she is
exhuming a small skeleton, probably an infant. In another part of the
valley, on the motorway itself, a small boy hits a lizard with his
slingshot, just before a car pulls into view containing two women. This
seems to excite the boy and he makes off in pursuit of the vehicle.
Meanwhile, his two friends are praying in the village church, but manage to
sneak out and meet up with the other boy who tells them that two prostitutes
have come to town and that they have enough money to pay for their services.
The two women meet up with two local farmhands and make for a barn. They
are accosted by Giuseppe, the local simpleton, who wants to watch them
perform but is driven away. As he attempts to spy on the women and their
customers, he is taunted by the three boys. He chases after them,
threatening to kill them. Later someone is seen preparing wax dolls as part
of an occult ritual. The dolls have needles driven into them and are shown
to represent the three boys. One of the boys goes to work with his mother
who is acting as a housekeeper for a female visitor to the village. He is
ordered to take some orangeade to the woman. On reaching her bedroom the
boy discovers her lying naked on a sunbed. She teases him about his lack of
sexual experience and offers to provide him with some just as his mother
calls him back downstairs. That night one of his friends is chased through
woodland by an unseen figure who eventually catches up with him and attacks
him just yards from his house. After four days of extensive searching in
the area around the village, the police are no nearer finding the child. A
reporter from a national newspaper phones in his report about the case and
tells his editor that the father has received a ransom demand for this son's
return and that he will investigate further. Unable to break through the
police cordon, the reporter manages to gatecrash a meeting between the
prosecutor and the family just as details of the ransom demand are
discussed. The journalist notes a major flaw in the kidnapper's demands
just as he is escorted out of the house. Later that night the father takes
the ransom money to the site agreed to with the extortionist, an abandoned
warehouse and places it in a disused furnace. Shortly after, the money is
retrieved. Then the man who retrieved is cornered and arrested by the
police, it turns out to be the village simpleton. Under interrogation the
man denies all knowledge of the fate of the boy, but a telephone call to the
father reveals his voice is the same as that claiming to be the kidnapper.
Eventually the police locate the boy's body and the simpleton changes his
story to where he claims that he merely found the child, already dead, and
buried him. The local priest turns up with the children from his soccer
team to pray at the site of their friend's body. Meanwhile the woman seen
unearthing the child at the hillside is lurking in the distance with a
discrete smile on her face. Although the simpleton has confessed to the
police, the prosecutor on the case is convinced that it is so full of holes
that the man could not have committed the murder and the real killer is
still at large. Some time later in the village, a washer-woman discovers
the corpse of another child.
REVIEW
For those familiar only with Lucio Fulci's work in the latter part of his
career, from the late 1970s onwards, may find Non si Sevizia un Paperino
something of a revelation.
The films from that later period were mainly notable for supernatural events
taking place in highly stylised, almost surreal settings that exist on the
border between two dimensions or realities. The village where this film
takes place can also be seen as existing on a borderline, but on this
occasion it is a physical and social border between two very different
worlds that has never really been breached to any degree.
One world is represented by the appearance of a monolithic four-lane
motorway that rises up from the valley in which the village is located.
This serves to symbolise the economic revival that much of Italy experienced
during the period after following post-WW2 reconstruction, with its
resultant conspicuous consumption represented by the many motor cars which
travel across it, packed with apparently prosperous families.
Another world, which harks back to a much earlier age, is represented by the
village itself. It is significant that the motorway rises far above the
village since contact with the contemporary world is somewhat restricted.
Access to the place is by treacherously steep and narrow side roads that
detour off the main road deep into the valley below.
Here the economic and social changes taking place in the rest of the country
have largely bypassed the community. While there is access to television,
the choice of newspapers and magazines is limited due to an arrangement
between the vendor and the local priest. The villagers themselves are
affected by varying degrees of poverty, lack of modern conveniences (the
public water supply is switched at night) and subject to extremes in
climate, ranging from near drought to ferocious thunderstorms, sometimes in
the same day. Since there is no direct route to the motorway and it has in
effect bypassed them completely, all that it represents of a modern nation
is irrelevant to the people of the village.
Because of this isolation the villagers have developed their own set of
moral and social values, along with spiritual beliefs and superstitions to
govern their lives. Much of this has been exploited and developed for its
own ends by the established church in the district, which remains the main
source of authoritative power.
The power of the church is seen extending to influence much of what would
normally be seen as its direct opposite, witchcraft, as represented by the
occultist Old Francesco (George Wilson, C'Era una Volta 67), who possesses
all the paraphernalia associated with sorcery but claims in fact that many
of his actions are guided by visitations from Christian saints. Early on,
one of the local police remarks on how the church and witchcraft are
dependent on each other as a means of social control.
The type of rural location featured in Non si Sevizia un Paperino, rural
Southern Italy, was the preferred setting amongst the neo-realist movement
in Italian cinema of the post-war years and their successors such as
Franceso Rossi, Vittorio De Sica and Ettore Scola. Another name that will
spring to mind when watching Lucio Fulci's film is Frederico Fellini, whose
use of "typeage", is echoed in the choice of local performers to represent
the residents of the village due to their grizzled, weather-beaten visages.
While these directors' productions from the 1950s and 1960s were seen as
fresh and original in their time, Fulci's use of them in a commercial
enterprise proves that in their representation of characters from this
region had become cliché.
The influence of neo-realism can also be detected in the cinematography of
Sergio D'Ofizi (Cannibal Holocaust 7. Whereas the movies from Fulci's
best-known period generally relied on special lighting techniques and the
use of filters along with extremes of shadow and light to create the proper
atmosphere for their fantastic events to take place, here a much more
naturalistic style is employed, taking advantage of the unique appearance of
the village, with its stark, whitewashed building and the desolate
surrounding countryside, lending the film at times an almost documentary
feel. Particularly successful is the contrast between the harsh
surroundings in which the villagers live and the smooth, almost featureless
aspect of the motorway in their midst.
Further references to this style of filmmaking can be found in the use of
hand-held cameras in certain sequences such as the lynch mob descending on
the police station and the seemingly at least partially improvised
interaction between the children.
While neo-realism seems to have had a strong bearing on the way the makers
have presented their story, another cinematic style that they had in mind
when making Non si Sevizia un Paperino was the French nouvelle-vague,
represented by the work of such directors as Jean-Luc Goddard (Weekend 67)
and Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451 66), which had an effect on a lot of
filmmakers, not just in Europe, throughout the 1960s and beyond.
Although displaying many of the naturalistic tendencies shown in
neo-realism, the practitioners of the nouvelle-vague style of production
introduced striking use of camerawork and editing, sometimes adapting
material from mainstream Hollywood productions, to give inject narrative and
visual dynamism into their work, made even more effective by the vibrant use
of locations.
Although the village in Lucio Fulci's film is presented in a realistic
manner, its isolation from the rest of the country and the accompanying
sense of being trapped within a form of time warp combine to create a
strange, rarefied atmosphere in which magic, or rather what is taken to be
evidence of it, is accepted as fact. Within this environment, and with no
overt contradiction from authority figures such as the priest or police, the
villagers believe that events can be manipulated and made sense of through
ritual.
As mentioned earlier, there is a strong correlation between the activities
of the church and the occultists. Both make their fortunes from exploiting
the beliefs of local people, seeking to impress them with the use of
elaborate rituals, the performance of the mass by the church while
witchcraft makes use of props such as waxen dolls and other props. They
also many of the same symbols notably a skeletal figure representing death
and play on people's fears. While the church is seen as a protector from
dark forces, the nervousness shown by the youngsters attending church
services suggests that it merely replaces one form of spiritual terror with
another.
Unlike most of his other genre-related output, where supernatural forces are
very prevalent, and are often the impetus behind the movie's plot, Lucio
Fulci goes out of his way to underline the redundancy of these forces in
relation to the events in Non si Sevizia un Paperino. This is illustrated
by the realisation by the character played by Florinda Bolkan that the magic
spells that she has let guide most of her life, and which she was using to
destroy the three boys who desecrated her dead baby's grave, has in fact
proved totally impotent. The children were not in fact killed by demons she
summoned but by an individual.
Ultimately any evil perpetrated in the film is the result of bigotry, fear
and madness, very much human traits.
Fulci's attitude toward the supernatural as regards this particular
production is best summed up by the priest's assertion to one of the boy's
under his care that magic and miracles do not exist. Another aware
character, the female visitor to the village (Barbara Bouchet, La Tarantole
dal Ventre Nero 71) merely uses the occult as a diversion from her usual
drug of choice, cannabis.
If the choice of location and eschewing of fantastic material, combine to
mark this film out from what is considered the norm in a Fulci enterprise,
there are additional features which make it even more unique.
There is a convention in the Italian horror and gialli cinema (not just
Fulci's) that murder victims are typically nubile, sexy females, often
punished for being just that in a genres often accused of being puritanical
and misogynistic. Here, in a twist which some may find even more
disturbing, the victims are preteen males. While the sexual motive
prevalent in movies of this type has been removed, a variation on the
puritanical and moral rationale remains in that the killer's actions are
governed by an insanely idealised vision of childhood innocence.
Fulci is a director with a reputation for frequent and graphic use of
violence and bloodshed throughout his career. In the case of this work,
however, much of the violence takes place off-screen, with only two overtly
gory sequences, both featuring adults rather than children. One occurs at
the end of the movie and has the killer fall to his death off a cliff, his
head and face smashing against outlying rocks on the way to the ground.
Although the effects by Gianetto De Rossi (Holocaust 2000 77) are somewhat
crude, they still prove rather startling. The other on-screen death is a
particularly harrowing sequence involving Florinda Bolkan.
Here Bolkan has been released from police custody after it is discovered
that she could not possibly have been responsible for the series of child
murders. However, the authorities have singularly failed to convince the
frightened and angry villagers of her innocence and they are set to take an
awful revenge on the woman with a reputation as a witch and an outsider.
The killing of Bolkan's character has echoes in two later Lucio Fulci works,
L'Aldila (81) and Paura nella Citta dei Morti Viventi (80). In the latter
an outcast from a community (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) is suspected of
involvement in the death of a local girl and her father takes a gruesome
revenge on the character, even though it is obvious that the simple-minded
character has not committed any crime, while in the former the method used
to assassinate a warlock (Antoine Saint-John) echoes that for the assault on
Bolkan with steel chains and iron bars.
Bolkan's beating and subsequent demise prove to be far more disturbing than
either of the ones mentioned previously since, unlike those instances, there
is no sense of reassuring detachment for the audience, as this event takes
place in a naturalistic environment and is handled in a realistic manner.
The brutality of the act is emphasised the way casual way in which the
violence is meted out by the four assailants,
During the attack on Bolkan, Fulci creatively employs two diverse pieces of
music, playing from car radios and used to cover the victim's screams. The
first is an upbeat pop song that the director appears to be using as an
ironic counterpoint to the brutal events being portrayed. The mood changes
dramatically with the second, as Bolkan first collapses from the effects of
her wounds before managing to struggle her way toward the motorway and help.
This is a slow mournful ballad that effectively evokes the plight of the
character and could easily have descended into campness. Fortunately Fulci'
s direction and especially the actress's efforts ensure that the sequence
emerges as powerfully moving.
It is in fact Brazilian-born Florinda Bolkan (Flavia - La Monaca Musulmana
74) who turns in the most outstanding performance in Non si Sevizia un
Paperino. Using her extraordinary dark eyes and body movement, Bolkan
effortlessly conveys the feral nature of her character such as when she is
seen exhuming the skeleton from its grave, being chased through a forest by
the police and her subsequent capture and interrogation along with her
confrontation with the children.
Fulci employs more irony when her magic spell intended to "break" the boys,
in fact proves useless and she experiences a conceptual breakthrough leading
to a seizure, which ultimately "breaks" her. Although the villagers who
later attack her, destroy her physical self, she is already spiritually dead
since her powers have deserted her or, it has dawned on her, they never
really existed in the first place. When she leaves the police station in
the morning after her interrogation she looks almost childlike in her
vulnerability as she makes her way warily through the hostile village, a
sharp contrast with the powerful being she was before.
The rest of the cast are generally very good notably Bouchet as the sexually
alluring and ambiguous interloper, who the priest believes to have a bearing
on recent events in the village. Some of the other actors are playing
against type by appearing outside of the genres that they are most
associated with. These include Marc Porel as the priest, who is best known
for his roles in crime thrillers like Duccio Tessari's Tony Arzenta (73) and
Ruggero Deodata's Uomini si Nasce Poliziotti si Muore (76) while Cuban
performer Tomas Milian playing the journalist, established himself in
spaghetti westerns from the 1960s onwards with titles like Sergio Sollima's
La Resa dei Conti (66) and Sergio Corbucci's Companeros (70) before moving
into police action flicks in the 1970s, typified by Bruno Corbucci's Squadra
Antiscippo (76).
As mentioned earlier in this review, some of the material and themes
contained in this work turned up in subsequent Fulci productions in a
revised form, notably an important plot device involving the Disney
character Donald Duck (which translates as "Paperino" in colloquial Italian)
along with a very distorted view of childhood innocence and perfection
reworked for the very sleazy slasher epic Lo Squartatore di New York (82).
Also appearing are references to earlier ventures from the director such as
Una Lucertola con la Pelle di Donna (71).
A recurring theme in the Fulci canon is his difficult relationship with the
Catholic church generally, and priests in particular, as evidenced by his
highly regarded period piece Beatrice Cenci (69) along with the later Paura
nella Citta dei Morti Viventi. Here a priest also proves to be the villain
of the piece.
Given how obviously the writers go out of their way to draw attention away
from the clergyman's involvement in the child murders until the final act,
while putting forward all the other main characters as more likely suspects,
it may have proved obvious to more aware viewers that he was the killer.
There is, of course, also the tradition in the British and American whodunit
novels that inspired the cinematic gialli that the least likely suspect was
almost always the culprit, again leading to the priest, a figure above
reproach in his community. An example of how the community views their
authority figure is that, under normal circumstances, the man's obviously
disturbed mother (Irene Papas, Un Posto Ideale per Uccidere 71) and her
handicapped daughter, would have been at least socially ostracised and more
likely driven from the community. Instead they are allowed to remain,
unfettered due to their relationship to the priest.
Despite the influences from other styles of filmmaking covered earlier in
the review suggesting the contrary, Non Si Sevizia un Paperino, is still
primarily a giallo in terms of plot and pacing.
Screenwriters Fulci, Robert Gianviti (Una Sull'altra 69) and Gianfranco
Clerici (5 Donne per L'Assassino 74) do their best to confound the viewer
with tortuous plot twists and a veritable shoal or red herring characters
paraded as suspects. A number of these are very obvious such as the local
simpleton (Vito Passeri) and the sinister mother of the priest. Especially
obvious is the use of Barbara Bouchet whose presence is so loaded with
coincidence, contradiction and general mystery, that if she did in fact
prove to be the murderer the revelation would rank as a major anti-climax.
So many characters are presented as possible culprits that some viewers may
get the impression that when the priest is finally revealed to be the
villain of the piece, it may have less to do with the director's obsession
with the clergy and more to do with the fact that he is the only choice left
for the makers to allow them to complete the movie.
Regarding the plotting, one of the problems the production faces is its
fragmentary nature, leaping from one character and situation to another with
no central character around which to anchor it. An ideal choice for this
would have been Tomas Millian's journalist (along with medics, a favourite
profession in the films of Lucio Fulci), who would have helped draw the
audience more easily into the complex plot and given them someone to
identify with. This lack of empathetic character may be a contributory
factor in why this film has fewer supporters than some other works from this
period.
If the plotting displays some shortcoming, it is largely made up for by
Lucio Fulci's direction. Much of the film is revealed to be a visual
tour-de-force, featuring dynamic camerawork and editing (Ornella Micheli,
Dracula in Brianza 75). Among the most impressive sequences are a very
atmospheric journey through a storm-lashed forest by one of the boys and
especially Florida Bolkan being chased and finally cornered by the police in
a woodland clearing. Bolkan's sense of panic is well conveyed by the use of
jump cuts between extreme close-ups of her eyes and rapid camera movements
(at one completely encircling her character) along with distorted POV shots.
The use of POV shots in the film is stylistically important since it conveys
the world view of characters, showing either wide-eyed fear of the situation
they are in or a distorted view of their environment or other people. This
is particularly well used during the interrogation sequences carried out at
the police station involving Bolkan that also benefits from inventive use of
hand-held camerawork.
The interrogation sequences serve to illustrate how Fulci and lighting
cameraman Sergio D'Offizi exploit a limited pace using very tight
compositions and constantly roving (sometimes tilting) cameras to underline
the tension in the room and the isolation of the suspected person.
Narrative-wise the picture moves at a cracking pace, with its fragmented
nature being used to good effect thanks to rapid editing and bold use of
sudden flashbacks to suggest more incident than was actually the case. In
any event the way these flashbacks are inserted eventually become quite
delirious, adding another layer of enjoyment to the proceedings for
discerning viewers.
Non si Sevizia un Paperino quickly disappeared from cinemas in Italy after
its initial release. Reportedly this was due to the efforts of a politico
from the region where the production was set who thought he recognised a
character in the movie as being based on him. The work resurfaced
intermittently during the 1980s on a number of European labels but it is
only through the release of an American DVD release that Lucio Fulci's film
has began to be reassessed.
©Iain McLachlan 2003 |
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| septimus |
| Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2003 7:34 am |
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Guest
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| Not familiar with Fulci, I regret to say. What else has he done? |
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