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Dillinger
Is Dead by Michael Atkinson
Long
live the New Wave era – roughly dating from the first French
and Polish firecrackers in the mid-'50s to, say, 1977, when
Star Wars changed the rules of international film
distribution and production forever. Looking back, it's easy
to see the flames of discontent, the youthful brio and hard-won
gritty realism, the realigning of film culture's priorities
away from "novelistic" entertainment and toward a
cinema of expression and exploration. But what can be overlooked
about that era's movies is their sense of freedom - virtually
anything could be attempted, any manner of narrative hijinks
may be pursued, any strategy could be applied. Dip into the
era's bottomless well, and you find collage anti-narratives,
wacky omnibus films, costume-parade anti-war farces, sex-&-talk
marathons, and so on.
What
Marco Ferreri did in Dillinger Is Dead fits right
in, but doesn't have a name. Existentialist anti-comedy? Symbolic
consumerist quasi-satire? Absurdist non-thriller? Minimalist
psychological case study? It has next to nothing to do with
John Dillinger, that's for certain. Even so, given the peculiar
nature of Ferreri's film, it's almost impossible to talk about
it in even a broad sense without giving the game away - not
that there is an easily readable "game" per se, or
a surprise climax. What happens in Dillinger Is Dead
is almost pure observation and zero traditional narrative, and
should be experienced blind. Suffice it to say that most of
the movie entails watching Michel Piccoli, as an Italian designer,
fix himself a meal at home, watch TV, and find a gun. Divulging
many more specifics would deflate what is a very fragile, very
strangely-shaped balloon.
The
pre-credit sequence is the only explicit clue we get toward
Ferreri's thematic mission, but it's a whopper: Piccoli's Glauco
tours a gas mask factory, and then attends a marketing meeting
where new-model gas masks are discussed in terms of their saleability
to average citizens, as defense against air pollution. The discussion
is forthrightly amoral and theoretical; the sales strategy focuses
on "mimesis" and "alienation," and the idea
that modern life is a simulation of manufactured consumerist
desires and TV-broadcast experiences is put in place right off
the bat. Then, Ferreri hits us with credits scored with a self-consciously
cheesy pop-skat tune. Glauco drives home to his crassly plasticized
flat, and discovers his nearly catatonic wife (Anita Pallenberg)
still in bed and fascinated by a bowl of goldfish. Then there's
dinner.
Dillinger
Is Dead is clearly
comical, even if it's rarely funny - only in the '60s could
a film dare to mock an entire social moment, and do it with
a bread-crumb trail of spare details. In fact, Ferreri is to
some degree satirizing his audience, and their desires, as Piccoli's
protagonist dawdles, begins cooking (steak and couscous), and
spends upwards of ten minutes looking for ingredients and spices
in his apartment cupboards. His live-in maid (Annie Girardot)
doesn't help; she also sticks to her bed, for the most part,
when she's not dancing around in body stockings, and letting
Glauco drip honey on her nude body. But it's in his rummaging
Glauco finds a pistol wrapped in newspaper detailing the gunshot
death of Dillinger over 30 years earlier (Ferreri mixes in some
news footage). Then he dismantles the gun, and then he marinates
it (in lemon juice). Then he cleans it, puts it together, and
decides to paint it. Blood red.
The
symbologies and simulacra are airborne in every seemingly pointless
scene, especially once Glauco sets up his home movie projector
and begins mixing the films he watches (bullfights, anxious
vacations) and the film he's in. The less happens in Ferreri's
film, the more it all signifies. Ferreri's sensibilities were
commonly outrageous, hypermasculine, and somewhat lecherous
- in Liza (1972), he had Marcello Mastroianni lead
Catherine Deneuve on a dog leash, and in La Grande Bouffe
(1973) his cast of men endeavor to fornicate and eat themselves
to death. With Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981), Ferreri
became the first filmmaker to plunge into the drunken indulgences
of Charles Bukowski. But Dillinger Is Dead is markedly
different - though laden with no small amount of sardonic attitude,
it's as sparse and mysterious as the other films are explosive
and blustery.
Contrary
to what you'd think given Ferreri's program, his film is consistently
engaging, even as it travels in the end to La Spezia and Byron's
Grotto, and then essentially implodes. Perhaps a lion's share
of credit should go to Piccoli, well-known from the world according
to Luis Buñuel but truly one of cinema's most treasurable icons,
a beady-eyed, balding everyman who has arguably made more great
films with more great filmmakers than anyone else. Piccoli doesn't
"act," he just is, and if it's an enigma as to why
Piccoli is so watchable, so fascinating, so ceaselessly amusing,
then that secret principle is one of the medium's primary axioms.
Courtesy
BAMcinematek
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