Love Meetings

A documentary shot by travelling across Italy. Pasolini goes into the street with a microphone. He travels from Sicily to Milan and asks people about sex. The questions are simple. Do children know where babies come from, does virginity matter, should divorce be legal, are women equal to men. The answers change with class and region. At a factory gate in the north and in a town square in the south, the same question gets entirely different replies. Some do not speak. Most of the women stay silent in front of the camera, and that silence is the film's plainest finding. From there the documentary draws a picture. What the country can say about itself and what it cannot. Two specialists appear between the sections. A writer and a psychoanalyst watch the footage, comment, and argue with the director. What the narrative is interested in is not sex but honesty: what the film actually finds is not what people think but that they know what it is proper to say. Pasolini does not hide his own view. The direction of his questions is plain and he argues directly with some answers. The method was familiar in Italian documentary of the period but the subject was not. Asking these questions in the open, of strangers, is itself an intervention. The film can also be read as a report on a moment. It was shot years before the arguments about divorce and abortion opened. Alberto Moravia and Cesare Musatti are among those who appear. Pier Paolo Pasolini directed and asks the questions. Who it is for: anyone curious about Pasolini and about Italy in the 1960s. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a constructed narrative; the film is question and answer throughout and visually plain.