It is surprising how consistent Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films
seem when they are viewed chronologically.
I’d seen Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), La ricotta (1963), and The
Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964) before starting this project, but
seeing them out of order (and intermingled with later, radically different
Pasolini films like 1975’s Salo) made
them seem like they could hardly be the product of the same filmmaker. When viewed in the order in which they were
made, Pasolini’s early films add up to a coherent and original vision that
conflates realistic depictions of Italy’s working class with heady spiritual
concerns. Hawks and Sparrows (1965) continues this trend to a degree,
focusing once again on poor characters who are at times presented as modern
Christian icons, but it also finds the writer-director dealing with any number
of other issues that happened to be on his mind at the time. The film’s rambling, episodic structure
suggests that Pasolini was searching for a new creative direction by throwing
everything at the wall and seeing what stuck.
For better and for worse, Hawks
and Sparrows is a transitional project.
Still, Hawks and
Sparrows is a particularly eccentric transitional project, and its
flamboyantly playful tone is signaled immediately by its unconventional opening
credits sequence. Ennio Morricone’s
jolly theme song features an opera singer belting out the name and occupation
of virtually every cast and crew member who worked on the film (the name of
regular Pasolini producer Alfredo Bini sounds particularly ridiculous in this
context). This enthusiastically
preposterous opening primes the viewer for a spastic story that follows an old
man (legendary Italian comedian Toto) and his son (Ninetto Davoli) as they
travel aimlessly down an empty road.
Eventually the duo is joined by a talking crow (voiced by Francesco
Leonetti) that provides a lot of random philosophical musing and social
commentary.
The loose plot seems to exist entirely to support these
stray bits of commentary. This isn’t
inherently a problem; Jean-Luc Godard built his entire filmmaking career around
rambling, episodic projects that often seemed like excuses to unload whatever
thoughts happened to be in his head as he was making them, and many of his
films were outstanding. But Pasolini
lacks Godard’s formal inventiveness.
Where the French New Wave master could make a wildly unruly film like Pierrot le fou (1965) seem vital through
sheer playful energy, Pasolini has only a few stylistic tricks up his
sleeve. Aside from the typically great
use of music (this time it’s all original Morricone material) and the deft,
straight-faced handling of the talking bird, there isn’t much of formal
interest in Hawks and Sparrows. The occasional use of comically sped-up
footage feels like a lazy return to something that worked better in La ricotta, which would be less of a
problem is Pasolini had at least a few other tricks up his sleeve. The director’s earlier films succeeded
because of the clarity of their ideas, while overt stylization seemed like a
secondary concern. Hawks and Sparrows lacks the earlier films’ thematic coherence, and
isn’t stylistically interesting enough to make up for it.
Since there is no consistent throughline in Hawks and Sparrows, the movie can only
work on a moment to moment basis.
Fortunately, the amusing episodes largely outweigh the tedious
ones. A lengthy aside in which the
travelers imagine themselves as Franciscan monks charged with converting a
flock of birds to Christianity is a particular highlight, with Toto eventually
learning to communicate with the birds through a series of subtitled
whistles. Also memorable is a
Fellini-esque sequence in which the protagonists help a rag tag theater group
push a car, deliver a baby, and have a fiery party. Hawks
and Sparrows has enough fun, eccentric scenes to be worthwhile, but as a
whole it lacks the intelligence and the provocative morality that Pasolini is
capable of.
UP NEXT Oedipus Rex and Medea
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