Dillinger è morto (Dillinger is Dead)

Dillinger is Dead is called writer/director Marco Ferreri’s masterpiece. It recently screened at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston as part of their Revival Series (http://www.mfah.org/films), a restored 35mm print that looks and sounds brilliant. This Saturday the theater was more than half full, but there was free parking, no lines, and no noisy crowds. In short, it’s a much more comfortable cinema experience than the multiplexes and with reliably more interesting films.

The film opens with it’s smartest scene, as Glauco (Michel Piccoli) and a coworker discuss their work as industrial designers of gas masks and how it relates to modern man’s connection to nature. Glauco intimates that he wants to abandon his career and spends the afternoon working on a screenplay in a friend’s office. Glauco arrives home to find that his wife (Anita Pallenburg) is asleep, and his maid (Annie Giradot) is drunk, so he continues pursuing art as a distraction from his real life. The film is largely silent, with only short aborted conversations between Glauco and his wife, and then later his maid, so the opening conversation about his intention to leave behind an obviously successful career is illustrated throughout.

Glauco is rapidly infantilized throughout the night. His afternoon of writing is followed by an admirable attempt at gourmet cooking, but as the night progresses, he loses focus and begins dancing senselessly, making shadow puppets against a film projector’s images on his living room wall. He manically paces his house searching for a creative outlet to bind him to his life as it is currently structured. He frequently turns on radios, which play American music, perhaps suggesting his desire to start fresh in his life.

His early creative pursuits of scriptwriting and cuisine degenerate into child’s play. He coos at the 8mm films he watches, he experiments with a rubber snake and his sleeping wife’s genitals. He finds a pistol, paints it in red and white polka dots, and pretends to shoot it in infantile glee. His regression is complete when he shoots his wife to death, drives to a beachfront site with ancient ruins, and, naked but for a loincloth, enters the ocean. In a film heavy-handed with symbols, this can mean little else besides rebirth.

So, reborn in morning’s light, he swims out to a very large wooden sailboat. The crew of the boat is performing a burial at sea. As Glauco dog-paddles in front of the wrapped dead body, he asks for a job replacing the dead crewman.

While the man may have achieved his goal, we are left unfulfilled, as we never felt sympathetic to his quest and certainly did not connect with his motivations. Ferreri impressed 1960s European audiences with his statement on modern man and his dependence on conveniences like refrigerators, gas stovetops, a Super 8 projector, and a home with a TV or radio in every room(!), but today’s cinema audience turned off the ringers on their Blackberries when the film started and merely saw a common narcissist driven criminally insane by his desires. The film depicts a sight as overwrought and uninteresting as O.J. Simpson or Michael Jackson and offers a lesson as unfresh as either.

The real treat tonight was escaping to MFAH’s immaculate Brown Auditorium Theater, which is Houston’s longest-running repertory theater and celebrates its 70th year showing films not available anywhere else in Houston. This is the cleanest, most comfortable cinema in town, with the most interesting offerings. The Revival Series continues next month with Bigger Than Life, directed by Nicholas Ray, but there are movies every Thursday through Sunday year round. See the schedule here: http://www.mfah.org/films.