The whores in hors d'oeuvres: A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY

"Bring on the multitudes with a multitude of fishes:
feed them with the fishes for liver oil to nourish the Artist
stretch their skin upon an easel to give him canvas,
crush their bones into a paste that he might mold them.
Let them die, and by
their miserable deaths
become the clay within his hands
that he might form an ashtray
or an ark." -- Maxwell J. Brock (A Bucket of Blood)

Italian art house cinema of the late 60s, she had to be a-very sneaky. European critics prepared with Hercules pens alone could confront its many hydra heads, but American critics scattered to the four winds like frightened goatherds at the sign of subtitles unless they saw breasts... and fast. The bourgeois neorealist sentimentalism of the 50s they were ready to understand, by the 1960s, but then came Antonioni's Blow-Up in 1966, and there was no putting Italian cinema back together again, even if it was shot in London. Who wasn't shot in London? All the best corpses and models and stoop-shouldered socialist toothed, deathly pale birds a casting call could couch. It didn't mean Italian cinema hadn't had its humpin' head handed to it on a Matisse bowler Salome platter by Blow-Up. It was like the Black Knight declaring none shall pass... lest they be limbless, and their limbs ground into pigment to redden the canvas of the artist.

When you film a girl in her scanties looking at tawdry X-rated photo books, thou has committed post-modernism AND made Joe Levine happy,

By 1968, Warhol, Lichtenstein, LSD, Vietnam, radicalism, labor strikes, women's lib were all hanging around and kicking the bomb-blasted corpses of neorealist prostitute madonnas and pinball-and-cigarette pimps, and for some, that was great news. But, paralyzed with the realization any movement they took outside the immediate blast radius would harden them into mock-ups of their plastic avenue parents, the dilated Now generation and the lecherous old intellectuals sleeping on their couches (or vice versa) stood in place anyway, paralyzed through fear of paralysis, there in the bone-splattered tiles and smoldering support beams, waiting to decide how they were going to rewrite the history they'd just erased, a new iconographical textbook printed on thee bones of blown-up mimes and Marxists. First they wisely found where Fellini was hiding (under the mawkish life-is-a-carnival-metaphor merry-go-round) and strung him up by his heels, but when it came to slitting his throat, they got squeamish and only pretended. They bravely ran away, suddenly afraid of committing too far in the dark direction, winding up stumbling on their dad's secretly stored Fascist Party parade uniform in the attic. Finally, unwilling to settle for all these faints and fantasies, all the empty cafe talk and amnesia and hallucinations, Argento grabbed a razor and made the cut, for real, on the throat of the woman, the artist as psychopath, and from that gaudy rococo throat gushed a dishwasher ocean of red... BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1968) soared aloft.. and immediately everyone who had been so reticent to do more than pretend to strangle their mistress or their husbands for a party game fake-out changed their minds and went scrambling through the ruins for a sharp shard of glass, for realsies. Now breasts and mod clothes and kinky psycho art shows weren't enough, while Ennio mocked from the playground slide whistle and tra-la-las, you had to kill 'em, fabulously.

The Money talked, or rather it psycho-babbled, and you had to be an idiot if you let your feeling of virginal castrationist angst hang you up into being afraid to listen to it. BIRD was a horror film the way  1966's BLOW-UP was a conspiracy thriller, or PERFORMANCE a British mobster 'lad' film, or PSYCHO a film noir.

In other words, the paralyzed post-BLOW-UP Italian cinema of the late 60s, she a-needed ow-you-say, not just a knife to her throat but slashes in big red strokes, tearing the canvas of the screen as well as her lovely neck, just to get her ass moving out of the post-modern pop art ruins and into the down and dirty 70s. And that's where A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968) comes in. For it is one of the weird, more vaguely satirical brothers of Argento's film, caught up in the same immediate post-BLOW-UP blast paralysis pop radius. It's the cool uncle the Argento generation never sees anymore except on rare holidays when we can get away to visit him at his 'funny' farm. We'd never know from his address how cool he is, I mean what is up with that title? A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY sounds like a Squaresville Merchant Ivory bucolic revery so trite and drawn out that only a half-asleep grandmother could like it. It doesn't even have a poster, for gods' sake. Is it deliberately trying to be lost to time?  That's why I made one (above), changing the name to u3prufj]gi]42go[ggr=gr.  The line between artistic genius and psychotic mania has seldom before been so succinctly erased, and that deserves at the very least a more evocative title!

That let's you know, I think, the level of absurdist surrealism and maniac amore you're getting when you make the trip to this mega-obscure proto-giallo. It's also got the best performance of a young Franco Nero, as an unhinged modern art painter named Leonardo, and it gave me a totalcrush on him. The way he tears around the crumbling estate, happy as a lark, reminds me of that old children's song by Napoleon XIV they used to play us in elementary school. Apparently he was living with Vanessa Redgrave at the time, and they both really loved making this movie, and it really shows, especially with him. If you're used to his terse inexpressive deadpan cool from DJANGO or THE FIFTH CORD you won't know what it you. Whether he's chasing the ghost of a nymphomaniac countess around his crumbling country mansion, or being chased by his needy art gallery owner girlfriend (Vanessa Redgrave), he's magnetic. So much is made of a bouquet of wild flowers, for example, he takes from the place where Wanda was killed and then throws to Vanessa but she's too busy moving 'civilized' stuff in for him, like a dishwasher. With his haircut too he resembles Francis "Brother Sun" of Zeffirelli's film leaving comfortable bourgeois textiles family to go starve in a church in the middle of nowhere. If you can imagine Francis' mom showing up after a week to move in a washer and dryer to keep his burlap rags clean, then you can imagine the entirety of Francis of Assisi's legacy might not even exist! For a male artist struggling with his issues the worst thing a woman can do is try to nurture and contextualize his madness for him rather than making an effort to synchronize and entrain her wavelengths to his, the difference between a parent able to enter their kids' imagined world, see things through their eyes, rather than just tiredly demanding they wash up for dinner or shrugging and saying "oh you kids." Even the photographer her PR guy brings has more of a grasp of the method to madness when he alone notices the flowers, or at least snaps a photo of them, and this enrages Franco, as if the photographer is stealing his wildflowers' soul, this young turk setting himself up like an Eve Kendall, building his own art off the madness of Leonardo, who rather than lighting a cigarette and talking about Marxist aesthetics through opaque Armani shades, reaches out to grab him his canvas hideout like an old dark house gorilla. The only girl who understands him is the ghost of the nymphomaniac countess, a combination anima (ala Rebecca or Laura), voyeur ghost (ala the male version of Quint in The Innocents) and softcore libertine, always dragging the film deeper into Poe territory, yet never needing to commit to the tropes beyond the basics, his obsessive gathering of Wanda photos an investigation mirroring a detective thriller - but he's not a cop, just an insane voyeur, thrilled to hear all the old men reminisce about losing their virginity to her. Is this just his distraction from doing any work or is this somehow mirroring his work? Is his work? Is the genius of art, the edge of pornography, the madness caused by obsessive voyeurism the same as investigative journalism, some Oedipal truth where the primal scene is behind every murder or the sexually frustrated Gothic hero alone in the house, a male version of Deborah Kerr in the Innocents, or Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly Last Summer, 

By contrast, Antonioni's madmen tended to be women, driven mad really by their not having an artistic outlet, rather than pursuing your madness over the edge for the sake of your art. Here Redgrave structures and profits by his madness, he's her canvas the way madness is his. His hallucinatory mania is the bedrock of real art as opposed to life-is-a-carnival hack balderdash being used to blot out the fear of death. The trick is to not let your maniacal whims lapse into incoherence. In case you can't tell, I'm not just talking about Franco Nero here. I wish I had a keeper tending to my basic welfare while I dug deeper and deeper into the termite melon of art criticism. And when Redgrave shows up the whole house conspires to kill her via roof cave-ins and falling shelves and exploding pipes while Nero stalks her like a combination Italian spy and playful child, stifled in his way by her suffocating sanity, her pedestrian conceptions making reality's glum prisoner, showing him her electric knife sharpeners as if begging him to tear them apart with withering Marxist critiques, pleading with him to touch her and make her relevant. He can only channel his misogynistic kinkiness through mock strangling or Poe-like fits of Morella-Ligeia possession, and that's how it gets to be both horror and not, because it fits both quite well without committing to one side, the way, say Polanski eventually commits with REPULSION. If murders can turn out to be just dreams and hallucinations instead of 'reality' it's very important that they still feel more relevant than the reality that surrounds them, otherwise it feels like a cheat. It takes a true surrealist to get that there doesn't need to be an 'it was all a dream' denouement. Even visionaries feel somehow obligated to bring things back to Squaresville, at the end, like dutiful spouses waiting at home to patiently chide you for not wanting to be patiently chided. Only the greats--Lynch, Bunuel --realize you don't ever need to do that. You can make a film that is all dream, all the time, and logic, truth, and reality will find a way in regardless. Reality is not fragile. Never be afraid to kick it square in the nuts!

So why is this masterpiece not more widely praised? Critics pee their pants praising other surrealist portraits of Italian male artist egocentric sex addict dysfunction like 8 1/2, but this film makes Fellini look like that insecure childhood friend trying to distract you from going off with the cool kids to smoke weed, read Penthouse Forum to each other in your friend's brother's van. It explores the overlap between insanity and art in ways more cogent than any I've seen before. TCM showed it this past Monday as part of their Creepy Art and Artists series, next to Mystery at the Wax Museum (the original) and Corman's Bucket of Blood, Thank god they put it in such magnetic company or I'd have never seen it. I almost didn't this time, because of that pastoralist banality of a title, but I heard the Ennio from the ther room and came loping back to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. Ennio in full muted trumpet, cacophonic drums, piano mash and children sing-song mode? What kind of giallo is called A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY!??!?!?! I came 'this' close to just turning off the TV and going to bed. It was, after all, 3 AM on a Monday night. But art never sleeps! Only death... lalalala
TCM's entry on the film mentions it kind of disappeared off the radar and never came to the states at all, and the "only reason it probably received distribution in an English-dubbed version in the U.S. in 1970 was due to the tabloid notoriety of Redgrave and Nero, who were living together openly and had a child."Which is interesting since PERFORMANCE was also filmed in 1968 and only released here in 1970. Were they both considered too dangerous? Too likely to spark a revolution, a riot, or a surge in mental hospital self check-ins? Well, even in 1970 nothing could get the cool drug kids of the States go see a movie called A Quiet Place in the Country. Good god... I know, because I never in a million years would have seen it nor be writing this if not for that Morricone muted trumpet recognition, because, frankly, I hate Italian period piece pastoralism and mawkish Merchant Ivory passions, all conjured by that staid title. I mean what kind of film has that bland name and then this is the first image you see?


You might look at this kind of self-reflexive indulgence and groan, thinking about incoherent image stringers like BABA YAGA or even annoying 'visualization of mental states' quirkiness like CARO DIARIO. But director Elio Petri is no whimsy-merchant or softcore hack anymore than he is giallo / gangster journeyman, nor a white elephant 'alienation' technician, nor some Marxist snot filming pinball and polemics through cafe windows, but a bonafide pop art post-Marxist artist whose Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is on Criterion with all the hearty handclasps that implies. So even if Quiet is such a down and dirty mindfuck it would make David Hemmings cry like little Chester in The Fatal Glass of Beer, and even the fantasy visualization bits are done correctly, so that we can't tell, it's still Art, baby, full of pop consumerist critique and ambiguity. We can wonder if Nero is tied up as part of some contemporary art gallery show she's curating, a hirsute performance art installation, or if this is just an abstracted sex scene. We see him in a place that's clearly meant to be a gallery of some sorts, an apartment of others, so that as with, for example, the apartments in Antonioni's Red Desert, we can't tell if Nero's artist is being haunted by a real ghost, or just going paranoid schizophrenic sex addict on us, whether he's genuinely dangerous or just 'playful,' whether this is all meant to be a dream, an art gallery show, or a couple hanging in apartment, with him feeling trapped in a tied-up situationist strait-jacket and she faux-enthralled by the wonders of the electric age.

Take it from me, to 'get there' as a crazy outsider artist you have to stop being afraid of going insane. Even David Hemmings spends a night at the men's shelter just to get his rolls of Diane Arbus-style dereliction at the start of Blow-Up, for example, a fearless plunging that Fellini is too much of a gaudy clown to get, but not our gentle 'gento. While Fellini's Vito, is hiding under a giant woman's skirts or under the table, Nero is stabbing her and kicking the table over and hacking his way clear, painting everything red, even his housekeeper.