Joys of meditation, excesses of reflection considered in a very Italian way

Giovanni Davide Maderna's film, challenging to watch though only 65 minutes long, deals with ultimate questions about what life means and how to live, but it presents them via a narrative so spare ordinary viewers are likely to find it baffling and unappealing—though, paradoxically, many of the amenities of Italian living are present: graceful landscape; an elegant old building; good food, well prepared, consumed at leisure; polite behavior. The "story" progresses slowly through a series of semi-tableaux with minimal dialogue, ending in fade-outs.

We begin with a shot of a road opening forward. Two young people, a boy and a girl, who later turn out to be graduate students, are in a car going along the road, the girl at the wheel. Their destination is a grand but slightly run-down country villa where they come to interview an aging writer who lives there as a recluse with two acolytes whom he supports. There were three, and the third turns up one night and talks about his useless wanderings.

There are several days of hopeful waiting when the writer—who's presumed to be on an upper floor meditating—puts off the students. "As they say," one acolyte tells them, "tomorrow is another day." And then a day or so later he says, "He will see you tomorrow, but one at a time." The students are welcomed and provided with a bedroom, towels, and pajamas. They share meals with the two long-haired followers, one tall and thin, the other plump and bearded. The writer remains upstairs and never communicates with the students, though he finally appears dramatically, shocking in appearance, after several days. But that is yet to come.

The bearded chap does most of the shopping and cooking, and the meals look like excellent Italian repasts—carefully selected ingredients, loving preparation. The girl even says one night, "Excellent roast beef. My compliments." Not much happens in the place besides ping-pong (played out of doors) and meals prepared mostly by the bearded chap (while the tall one is the ace pong man and he shows the girl his stroke in more ways than one). She tells him at breakfast she's been all over the world. She has also thoroughly read the writer's works and admires them, and she quotes by heart one passage about freedom and self-determination. The boy, who has long pretty hair, reveals to the cook that he's contemplating a sex change and taking hormones. He's popping too many of them, and one night they make him throw up.

After the writer's spectral appearance, the boy and girl leave separately. The boy drives the car and while driving, strips off all his clothes except a pair of the girl's striped underpants, which he's swiped. A song he listens to on the radio talks about freedom. A highway policeman stops him but then lets him go. The girl takes a bus to a town where she meets a woman friend who tells her she must be content with something other than her ideal job at first. She has told the tall thin acolyte she wants to work and stop living with her parents. In the final scenes the girl has discarded her shoes and begun panhandling on the street and the boy is walking off the road into a field with another man, perhaps for sex.

Everyone in 'Schopenhauer' is a seeker; maybe a knowledge of Schopenhauer's ideas about "will" and "representation" would help one interpret their paths, which may very well grow out of the German philosopher's belief that the world is not a rational place and that its ills are best confronted by adopting an ascetic lifestyle. One subject of the film clearly is the contemplative life and the peace it can bring; another, conversely, is the danger of excessive introspection. The acolytes, the girl notes, are like monks, and they seem to have achieved a state of peace. However, their world seems bounded by ping-pong and food. The two students are in a state of flux. The girl wanted to leave her boyfriend, or at least cheat on him; she also wants to leave her parents and go out on her own. The boy seems a little desperate. Everything is discreet, European, Italian—as underlined by everything we see, the landscape, the town, the villa, the leisurely well-prepared meals, the good behavior—though everyone is so restrained you half expect somebody to scream; and the returning third acolyte, who bangs repeatedly on the door, seems desperate enough to do so. From this it seems Maderna's is a cinema of exhaustion, whose seekers seem a little too marginalized, isolated, and repressed to discover much of anything. They are either safely and uselessly cut off from the world, or in it but endangered and lost. The film itself seems a stifled cry of desperation—though it falls comfortably within a tradition that includes Pasolini's Teorema and Antonioni's L'Avventura, as well as Bellocchio's more recent Buongiorno, notte.

Shown as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center June 2007.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.