Pasolini: Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows) (1966)

As they developed over the 1950s, the earliest, rawest impulses of Italian neorealism blossomed out to a mystical, Franciscan humanism, a vision of history offered up for the weak, the powerless and the invisible. In many ways, Pasolini’s third film, released in the late 1960s, plays as a swansong for this moment, familiar enough with it to be a bit irreverent as well. Like most neorealism, it’s propelled by wandering – in this case, the wandering of an old man, played by legendary Italian comedian Toto, and his son, played by Pasolini’s lover Ninetto Davoli, across the Italian countryside. However, where neorealism envisaged the Italian landscape as a site of desecration, or desecration that was just starting to disguise itself as reconstruction, Pasolini’s vistas are choked with half-built highways and apartment complexes, colonised by all kinds of American pop culture, inducing a surreal, picaresque film-within-the-film – narrated by a talking crow – in which Toto and Ninetto try to reconnect with nature by talking to hawks and sparrows, in their own version of Francis’ sermon to the birds. Laced with Pasolini’s sharp wit, his taste for demystifying ritual and ceremony, it would probably play as straight parody were it not for the fact that Toto himself was the most Franciscan of Italian actors, an iconic, omniscient lover of the poor and friend to animals. In lieu of parody, then, Pasolini collapses neorealism into the cult of Toto, here expansive and beatific enough to incorporate even the loss of Palimiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, whose elegy opens the film. And, as in so many of Pasolini’s films, his Franciscan Communism crystallises around the saintliness of young men, which is to say the saintliness of Davoli. In later years, Pasolini said that Hawks and Sparrows was his favourite film, and it may be because you can see him falling in love with Davoli before your very eyes; every shot of his face feels hand-held, or hand-stroked, forerunners of the Gus van Sant of Paranoid Park, or Bryan Singer’s take on Brad Renfro in Apt Pupil. For all its occasional spikiness, then, it’s one of Pasolini’s most tender, reverent offerings, and possibly his greatest declaration of love, both for Davoli and for the country that created him.