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The Appropriate Tune: "Il Cielo In Una Stanza", by Mike Patton & The Metropole Orchestra
We’ve reached the summit folks. Every year for quite a few years now I’ve dedicated the month of October to something I call The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul. 31 days, 31 films, 31 reviews. At a time in my life that could be loosely described as ‘rock bottom’, at a time when the world seems to be doing the same, this shitty little collection of text and jpegs that no one reads has been one of the few bits of metaphorical solid ground I’ve been able to touch down on. A chance to flex my creative muscles, a place to work through my various episodes, all within the context of me complaining about somebody else’s work. Even when this blog has been all but dead, the Marathon has still persisted, beyond all sense of reason or the confines of Halloween. Maybe I can’t muster the will to let it go, or maybe deep down this is what I like to do, the source of my passion. Either way I guess I’ll keep going as long as I can.
As has been more recent tradition, the last ten days of the month are reserved for foreign films, specifically those outside the U.S.A/U.K./Canada area. Today I thought I’d take a visit to Italy, a region which has been a consistent source of genre films for the Marathon over the years. For a while I was considering covering something by Lina Wertmüller, but given some other revisions we’ll be seeing in the future I decided to change things up. For the sake of variety and, as always, because I felt like it at the time.
Released in 1962 through Cineriz, Mondo Cane was directed jointly by Gualtiero Jacopeti (who also produced the film and wrote the narration heard throughout the film), Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi. A documentary, Mondo Cane’s intent is to show off various aspects of human life from around the globe, in particular the enticing, the morbid, and the bizarre. Visit a village in Italy where the Good Friday celebration involves the priest leading a procession through the streets beating his legs with shards of glass. Take a trip to a restaurant in Taipei where dogs make up the menu. Try not to blink when passing by a village in Malaysia who’s main source of income is fishing for sharks, and they’ve got the bodies to prove it. It’s a wild, terrifying world we live in, says the minds behind Mondo Cane, and they’re giving you a front row seat to the show.
The colloquial term for films like Mondo Cane would be ‘shockumentaries’; Films which deal in intense subjects, sex, violence, substance abuse, what have you, in order to draw the audience in. In the Italy of 1962 some naked breasts and an ass or two is as far as you get when it comes to sex, barely a step above cheescake Barbarella stuff, but they make up for it with plenty of violence and death. When they show a ceremony in Papua New Guinea involving a slaughtering and roasting of pigs, Mondo Cane leaves nothing to the imagination; You get to watch as tribesmen, armed with heavy wooden clubs, gather in circles and beat the brains out of the pigs before tossing their corpses on the fire. When we visit a shop in Malaysia that sells snake meat, we don’t cut to people enjoying a little snake curry, we get to see the butcher stretch that serpent out and slice it up the middle like a bit of shoe leather. Those out there with strong stomachs will be able to handle the more morose elements of the film, but if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to know how the sausage is made (quite literally in the case of the force feeding geese scene) or generally doesn’t like to see animals suffering then this is definitely not the film for you. Even as someone who has watched dozens of horror films over the years, I found some of the stuff in Mondo Cane rather gruesome.
Of course there’s also the question of who Mondo Cane is geared towards. While it is true that this film is international, when it comes time to highlight the ‘weirdness’ of the world there is a definite focus on certain regions like Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, aside from its native Italy. The main thrust of Mondo Cane is in social commentary; at pointing out the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the world with an aloof, detached air, yet will quite often descend into chauvinism. Mondo Cane is quick to disparage and mock in a scene where American tourists visit Hawaii and take in hula lessons, making points that are quite poignant even today, and yet it takes a 180 in a later scene where a Papua New Guinean tribe is taking communion at a Catholic mission, describing it in sentimental tones as the ‘last bastion of civilization’ in that area. Not to mention several comments directed towards New Guineans, Chinese and other such peoples that could be taken as patronizing at best. Is it racist on the level of Birth of a Nation? No, but if my skin was the same shade as those being gawked at on screen I’d probably find it uncomfortable, and so it might be for others.
If there’s one thing I’ll praise about this movie though is this music. It’s constantly switching up throughout the movie, from orchestral stuff to big band swing, to lounge jazz and even though the transitions weren’t always smooth I still found it enjoyable. The music was done by Nino Oliviero and Riz Ortolani, the latter of whom was a composer for over two hundred films in his career, particularly genre films, so chances are that we’ll be seeing him again in the future.
Ultimately though, I don’t think I can recommend Mondo Cane. Putting the casual racism aside, I don’t think there’s that much, really, to drive a viewer’s interest these days. While there is this sort of Addams Family-style cheerfully macabre atmosphere that’s a tad infectious, the shock and awe tactics that worked so well back in the 60s have lost most of their luster in these modern times. There are hundreds of videos on youtube with people eating weird stuff for example, so half of this movie has become superfluous. It was popular enough to get a sequel a couple years later though, so maybe that film would be a more palatable Halloween treat than this one.
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