Hey folks, Harry here with an old friend of Cuba's... Mellish. Mellish has been fielding the films of Toronto and has decided to chime in first about THE CONTEXT... He's an associate of the inhuman Anton Sirius, who recommended this puncher of keys and mice, here ya go...
The Context – Review by Mellish
Hindsight is perfect they say, and for once I know exactly what they mean. Elevator boots, feathered bangs, poodle skirts, “Choose Life” t-shirts ….. it was a fait accompli that these delicious items of fashion would be cast aside, only to be gathered up again when the popular culture became exhausted. Which explains Saturday Night Fever on Broadway, the current success of Bon Jovi’s latest, Sha Na Na’s tenure on the airwaves and sounds a warning for us all to brace for the inevitable re-emergence of Andrew Ridgley.
Which naturally brings us to The Context. It occurred to me while fluffing my down-filled pillow and hitching up my Ralph Lauren comforter (really, people, press and industry screenings are the only way to view films), that with the benefit of hindsight, proclivities of time and geography are bound to arise. As countries are to genres, decades are to themes. Case in point: the current ascendancy of Iran to the top of world cinema, most often with stories focusing on children, tales of achingly tender power of not only a child, but a country, coming of age. Further to that: the barely restrained homoerotic subtext of 80’s action spectaculars, stories of thwarted desire given vent in orgasmic fireballs and geysers of bullets (with any luck, we’ll never be treated to Abbas Kiarostami’s Bad Boys 2: Damn!).
No one did neo-realism like the Italians, and no decade did social injustice like the 70’s. From those two parents we are given the offspring called The Context. A scathing indictment of the corruption of absolute power (or the desire for it) wrapped up in a frighteningly prosaic package by director Francesco Rosi.
When high-ranking members of the Italian judiciary community start falling to sniper’s bullets, a policeman (Lino Ventura--looking an awful lot like a seedier Ben Gazzara, if you can imagine it) embarks on an investigation that uncovers a widespread conspiracy involving the Chief of Police and a plan to supplant the current political power with an iron-fisted one.
The pace of The Context, or as it is sometimes known, Honourable Cadavers (also the working title of a book detailing the solo careers of ex-Saturday Night Live cast members), is steady and deliberate and it is a wise choice. Many paranoid thrillers opt for a tone of increasing panic and frenzy in an effort to draw the viewer into the world of the protagonist and the encroaching madness that accompanies the entanglement in a web of conspiracy and murder. Fortunately, Rosi made the decision that the viewer would be able to come to that conclusion on the mere presentation of the facts instead of enervating stylistic flourishes or ‘tension-filled’ stand-offs with shadowy figures skulking around underground garages in long coats and ill-advised fedoras (I mean really, who else but an agent of governmental malfeasance sports those foolish things anyway?).
The central problem with that hackneyed style is that it always leaves room for doubt. In an effort to set up the inevitable pay-off of our innocent protagonist framed as a top-ranking member of the conspiracy he was trying to uncover, it plants in the mind of the viewer the possibility that what was just witnessed was the interior ramblings of a lunatic. It also conveniently allows the idea of a government enacting nebulous stratagems for increased control of the populace to be left behind to watch the curtain rise after the final credits. Rosi makes the possibility of such a scenario tangible by his slow, near-plodding pace. The result is a more satisfying film: when the phone-tappings, foot chases down dimly-lit streets and frame-up occurs, it plays as an eerily natural conclusion to a nefarious conspiracy instead of a final act plot point designed to tie up all the loose ends (in hindsight, Arlington Road doesn’t seem the tightly-knit thriller I once thought it was).
So why, one might ask, if the film is so sharp (and it was named co-winner of the 1976 Palme d’Or), why is Francesco Rosi’s name absent from the standard roll call of Italian masters? Two words: Jim Belushi (for which there are three chapters dedicated in the forthcoming Honourable Cadavers, available this fall from Lorne Michaels’ own Broadway Video imprint ). In 1990, Rosi directed a film called The Palermo Connection and, as such, is victim to the “Jim Belushi Curse”, which dictates that all who work with him are destined to become like him, i.e., a footnote to be glanced over on your way to the glossy pictures in the middle of the book. Things might have looked better for our director if he’d gone with another project around the same time, The Blues Brothers Stopped at Eboli. I hear the set-piece, which was to feature Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi trying to stop a planned assassination of the Pope, bumbling around the Vatican to the strains of “Flip, Flop and Fly”, would have been to die for.
Perhaps we should think of Francesco Rosi directing films in Italy in the 70’s, when he was in his prime. You know, in hindsight.
Mellish
