Paolo Cavara was one of the three directors who had a huge hit with "Mondo Cane," though after an immediate followup he split from the other two directors, who continued to make films together for another decade. They all did some interesting work later, and all no doubt share the blame for the whole "mondo" phenomenom, but Cavara was clearly attempting to atone with this fictive expose. Philippe Leroy plays a cynical documentarian (more or less) roaming the globe in search of shocking content, even if he has to stage it himself. He pushes people into degrading or false situations, and ambulance-chases after misery, executions, even a terrorist bombing he's been tipped to, but deliberately warns no one about. Gabriele Tinti plays his cameraman, while Delia Boccardo is the beautiful young woman he seduces away from her husband, seemingly mostly so he has someone he can use for "horrified" cutaway shots when he's filming some atrocity.
No satire but an all-too-serious indictment of "mondo" phoniness and pandering, the movie may well have seemed bitterly incisive in 1967. But now, after a quarter century or so of "reality TV," it seems pretty tired for a movie to spend 97 minutes telling us that filmed "reality" isn't necessarily real, and its makers are often crass exploiters. It's a point that the movie makes over and over with little variation, and no evolution in the characters. Leroy stays just the same prickly opportunist, and Boccardo stays just the same decorative "object" (as he takes pains to tell her) giving him wounded-puppy looks. We're supposed to believe she stays with him despite her moral repugnance because she's a masochist (or so he claims), or because he's good in the sack (so we infer). But frankly her character is such a cardboard, passive simp, we can only view her as an idiot.
The movie is very well-shot on various exotic locations and has a lush, colorful (if sometimes inappropriately lounge-y) score. But its critique is too simplistic and repetitive to have any impact, at least not anymore. Alberto Moravia gets a special credit for "screenplay collaboration," probably just to heighten the film's respectability-god knows there's precocious little of the psychological dimensionality here that you might expect from his input.
The "mondo" movies and all they represented offered rich opportunity for some penetrating social analyst--but it's pretty clear Paolo Cavara was not that person. He bites the hand that fed him here, but "Wild Eye" is not itself intelligent or insightful enough to really say anything that hadn't already been said in spades, even then...about "mondo" cinema, commodity culture, et al.
No satire but an all-too-serious indictment of "mondo" phoniness and pandering, the movie may well have seemed bitterly incisive in 1967. But now, after a quarter century or so of "reality TV," it seems pretty tired for a movie to spend 97 minutes telling us that filmed "reality" isn't necessarily real, and its makers are often crass exploiters. It's a point that the movie makes over and over with little variation, and no evolution in the characters. Leroy stays just the same prickly opportunist, and Boccardo stays just the same decorative "object" (as he takes pains to tell her) giving him wounded-puppy looks. We're supposed to believe she stays with him despite her moral repugnance because she's a masochist (or so he claims), or because he's good in the sack (so we infer). But frankly her character is such a cardboard, passive simp, we can only view her as an idiot.
The movie is very well-shot on various exotic locations and has a lush, colorful (if sometimes inappropriately lounge-y) score. But its critique is too simplistic and repetitive to have any impact, at least not anymore. Alberto Moravia gets a special credit for "screenplay collaboration," probably just to heighten the film's respectability-god knows there's precocious little of the psychological dimensionality here that you might expect from his input.
The "mondo" movies and all they represented offered rich opportunity for some penetrating social analyst--but it's pretty clear Paolo Cavara was not that person. He bites the hand that fed him here, but "Wild Eye" is not itself intelligent or insightful enough to really say anything that hadn't already been said in spades, even then...about "mondo" cinema, commodity culture, et al.