Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center 2018

[Chris Knipp]

MARCO FERRERI: THE APE WOMAN/LA DONNA SCIMMIA (1964)


ANNIE GIRAUDOT AND UGO TOGNAZZI IN THE APE WOMAN

Funny creepy

Marco Ferreri's 1964 French-Italian production The Ape Woman/La donna scimmia is an odd combination of love story, horror story, and satire. It has some of the feel of the Italian comedies of the sixties, but it goes further, towards creepiness. In its story of a fairgrounds huckster and the woman he uses who loves him, it arouses obvious comparisons with Fellini's La Strada. But it's a different story. In fact, in the Bologna L'Immagine Ritrovata restoration with alternate endings, it's three stories. It's hard to know what to make of it. But it's impossible to overlook. It's one of the iconoclastic Italian director Ferreri's strange creations, brutal satire, full of Italian good humor.

Focaccia (Ugo Tognazzi) is a sleazy promotor who's enjoying a free meal in the kitchen of a Naples nunnery, when he discovers shy Maria (Annie Giraudot). When he presses and finds she's covered with soft hairs on body and face, his eyes light up with Lire signs. A series of tableau-like scenes follow, some personal, some public. Focaccia's whole effort is to exploit Maria as a freak. He pretends to have found her in a wild, ape-like state exploring in Africa, and builds a little wood cage for the shows. He teaches her to bare her teeth like a monkey and swing from a fake tree. But he can't have her with him unless he marries her. And so the wedding is one of the tableaux. It's done for publicity. Now Maria is no longer ashamed, and there are tears in her eyes as she's paraded through the street singing off-key. Her feelings are mixed, to say the least.

They are a circus-style working couple, and have a domestic life. She cooks for him. An orphan, raised in the nunnery, she learned to. After the wedding, she insists they sleep together, and they have a sex life. From the start, Focaccia is both nice and mean to her. He soothes her, saying she's "not so bad," and is affectionate. But then he takes her to a rich collector of monstrosities who, told that she's a virgin, wants to pay a large sum to have her to himself for a few days. Maria will have none of it, ending that deal. Tognazzi deserves our admiration for making the real monster, Focaccia, who will pimp out his own domestic partner and exploit her as a freak, bearable to watch, though our sympathies are always with Maria.

Things seem to be going pretty well (though Ferreri doesn't show the show-biz side of the story in much detail) when Maria gets pregnant. Another particularly creepy and compelling sequence follows when a tall, gangly young French doctor examines her for stomach pains and declares her to be pregnant, then insists that she must have an abortion. A little old domestic servant who acts as interpreter of the doctor's French is appalled, barely willing to utter the word "abortion" in Italian. The always sensible Maria will have none of this idea either.

The birth of Maria's child leads to the three endings: one sad, one repugnant, and one positive and happy. The sad ending is too abrupt and brutal and must have resulted from the censors objection to some aspects of the longer "Italian ending." Spoiler alert: here are the three endings.

In the late stages of Maria's pregnancy, there is a scene on a balcony in the nice Naples hotel where they are staying (they have dough from the "performances" even if it's going to run out soon: the hotel is paid up for the month). In it Maria touches her face, and some of the hairs are falling off. He reassures her that it's just part of pregnancy, and they'll grow back richer than ever when the baby's born. Then, after childbirth, Maria is on an oxygen tank, barely able to breathe. She is dying, and Focaccia lies to her that the baby is in an incubator doing fine, but we understand. In a brutally satirical moment, one of a set of observing doctors boasts that he can publish a good article about this.

The "unabridged Italian version" continues to show Focaccia reclaiming Maria's embalmed body from a museum, to use it as an attraction in his own circus freak show. And the state museum must turn it over, because she's his wife. A tableau of the show follows, with new details, including a male collaborator on the story of African exploration spouting learned fake Latinate phrases. This sequence is numbing.

Jump to the "French ending." Ferreri dies in French, and collaborated much with French cinematic artists. Why is this version so different, so positive? Did the filmmaker feel it was only the Italians who needed the prodding of cruel satire? Anyway, in this version, Maria does not die, nor does the baby, who is a healthy, completely normal boy, with head "as bald as an egg." She loses all her abnormal face and body hair, and becomes - the pretty Annie Giraudot, who has been lurking clearly behind the fake hair all along of course. Without the freak show wife, Focaccia complains he has no livelihood, and he fast runs out of money. He is pushed to go and work at the port. He resists, but eventually gives in. In the final tableau, a happy Maria comes to greet Focaccia after work down at the port, with their young son at her side, and pregnant again. Focaccia is making good money now, and all is well. All that strangeness is behind them. They are a normal, happy little family. As if all that came before was just a bad dream.

Produced by the impresario Carlo Ponti, The Ape Woman features the black and white cinematography of Aldo Tonti (Europa ’51, Nights of Cabiria, Barabbas) and is one of many Ferrerri collaborations wth his Spanish co-screenwriter Rafael Azcona, who wrote with him his most famous film, the all-star attack on consumerism La Grade Bouffe.

The Ape Woman/La donna scimmia, 92 mins., opened in Italian theaters Jan. 1964 and showed at Cannes 4 May 1964, and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. It opened in NYC Sept. 1964 (dismissive, abusive review by the Times' sometimes clueless Bosley Crowther). It released in France as Le Mari de la femme à barbe. A digital restoration showed at Venice Sept. 2017, and this version was shown at Lincoln Center as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinama, where it was screened for this review.

Showtime at Walter Reade Theater:
June 5 -8:45 PM

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERTO DE PAOLIS: PURE HEARTS/CUORI PURI (2017)


SILENE CARAMAZZA AND SIMONE LIBERATI IN PURE HEARTS

Tough stuff

In a fast, highly focused sequence that sets the tone for the whole movie, at the outset of Pure Hearts/Cuori puri a girl is chased and caught by a young man working as a security guard. She has stolen a cell phone from a mall. She begs him to release her and he relents, and lets her walk away with the phone.

She has not walked out of his life but into it. How can they resist each other's intensity? These two star-crossed lovers won't let each other go, and the stuff pulling at their lives won't, either. Nor can we resist this compelling first scene and its consequences. Cuori puri is a fiercely focused little movie that runs and won't let you go. The title refers to Christian doctrine, but the movie itself has a "pure heart" too. Equally important, it has a good plot built out of the simplest and knottiest of everyday issues.

The girl is Agnese (Silene Calamazza) and the young security guard is Simone (Simone Liberati). Agnese is 17, about to turn 18. She is part of a Christian school and community and lives with her single evangelical mom. She is slim and pretty. Stefano is 25, robust and good-looking, seething with repressed energy. The outcome of their encounter makes her deeply grateful to him, and arouses an attraction in him that almost immediately finds a strong echo in her. He's from the wrong side of the tracks. She's under unusually trying moral constraints.

Agnese's Christian mother Marta (Barbora Bobulova) is kind but worried and overprotective. The reason she stole the cell phone turns out to be that her mother has taken hers away and won't return it, thus cutting her off from her school friends. Marta has pressed Agnese to take a vow of chastity till marriage, and she has agreed. But evangelical principles aside, Marta's seizing of Agnese's cell phone for suggestive messages she insists the boys sent her unsolicited is a sign Marta can't adjust to having a teenage daughter. Marta's mistrust is the kind that spurs rebellion in any normal teenager.

Before long Agnese and Stefano run into each other again - they're in the neighborhood - and before you know it he's kissing her. He puts his number on her new stolen phone, and an intense back-and-forth relationship ensues. This, Agnese must hide from her mother, leading to a major deception when the attraction leads to consummation - a vivid first sex scene.

At the film's Cannes 2017 Directors' Fortnight debut Jay Weissberg wrote a review of the film for Variety and Harry Windsor wrote one for Hollywood Reporter. Windsor praised the film for dealing with issues (religious fundamentalism, the Roma population) without seeming didactic. Weissberg was encouraged to see a small, original movie getting a major push-off against a sea of bigger budgeted Italian "mediocrities." This is encouraging. Cuori puri may be the new Italian neorealism. There are so many issues here, but they count as nothing against the attraction of a young couple falling in love, the force of it keeping things real.

Letting Agnese go gets Stefano fired from the mall and leaves him now stuck with a tedious new job guarding a parking lot. It adjoins a camp of Roma - gypsies- who are constantly threatening to overrun the flimsy wire fence, and apart from this constant provocation Stefano is ill equipped to deal with, this is a dull, lonely job.

Stefano speaks full-on Roman dialect and grew up poor. It turns out that while lately he has been trying to make a living by honest means, he was part of a small-time gang headed by drug dealer Lele (Edoardo Pesce, also in Open Roads 2018 film Fortunata, as well as Garrone's Cannes prizewinner Dogman). Thanks to his deadbeat, formerly abusive father (Federico Pacifici) ) Stefano's parents are months behind in rent and about to be evicted. They will be forced to go and live in a trailer, which also can't last. This turn of events makes Stefano see his people are not much of a cut above the Roma, who Lele tells him have plenty of money, despite their "caravans." Lele observes Stefano's struggle with the parking lot mockingly.

A Stefano, Liberati is a live wire. His sheer power onscreen impresses without seeming too theatrical. The movie is anchored by the explosiveness of the scenes between Caramazzi and Liberati, even on a first date when they go to the beach - for which she has realistically prepared by shaving around her pubes. This seemingly little swim is not without a playful underwater scene, symbolically underlining how deep the pair is raidly going.

But the well constructed screenplay insures that the scenes in between are almost as good, even the group ones where the big, bearded young evangelist priest Don Luca (Stefano Fresi) teaches the group Agnese is also in. Though De Paolis means us to see there is purity outside rigid chastity, Don Luca is likable and his lessons sound sensible. (Likewise the Roma get, though at some remove, a fair shake.)

Pure Hearts, satisfyingly, gives you no time to think. It's not very clear how Marta supports herself and Agnese or what Agnese's life is like outside Don Luca's pep talks and Stefano's wooing. De Paolis invests heavily in intense, emotional scenes, with no time spent on background or atmosphere, but it works.

Pure Hearts/Cuori puri, 114 mins., debuted 23 May 2017 in Directors Fortnight at Cannes, showing in at least five other international festivals. It was screened for this review as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2018. Q&A with Roberto De Paolis on June 1.

Showtimes (Walter Reade Theater)
June 6 -2:00 PM