Pigsty

Two stories are told in alternation and never meet. In one, a young man wanders a volcanic wasteland, kills soldiers and eats human flesh; he barely speaks. In the other, in post-war Germany, the son of an industrialist family is not loved by his fiancée and goes to the pigs in the sty. The subject is not perversion but two forms of refusal. Both young men refuse to join their fathers' world; one chooses cannibalism, the other pigs, and both arrive at the same end. At the political centre is former Nazis continuing as industrialists, which is what Pier Paolo Pasolini is openly attacking. The form keeps the two strands deliberately apart. The wasteland passages are silent and almost documentary; the German passages are theatrical, full of long literary speeches. The mismatch between the two styles is the film's idea. The production belongs to Pasolini's harshest period and carries no intention of pleasing an audience. Its famous last line states in one sentence how confession is silenced by institutional order. Pierre Clémenti plays the man in the wasteland, Jean-Pierre Léaud the industrialist's son and Anne Wiazemsky his fiancée. Who it is for: viewers who like Pasolini and political allegory. Who it is not for: anyone looking for narrative; the film is deliberately difficult, cold and makes no attempt to communicate.