“Every man is made different… in his physical structure he’s made different also in his spiritual dimension. So all men are in their own way abnormal. All, in a sense are in conflict with nature…” —Giuseppe Ungaretti, Love Meetings
What do you get when director Pier Paolo Pasolini interviews Italians from Rome to Calabria to Sicily, from every age and economic background regarding the “sexual issue”? Love Meetings, a cinéma vérité masterpiece shot from August to September, 1963. By sexual issue I mean questions regarding morality, machismo, repression, conformism, homosexuality, marriage, chastity and prostitution. Microphone in hand, he candidly asks kids in Palermo how a baby is born. Their answers range from the stork, to flowers, to God and to my uncle. So begins his journey.
His queries take him from factories to beaches. While interviewing women outside a factory in Milan, Pasolini makes the viewer think about why girls are supposed to be chaste. He asks them why work in the factory when they could work as prostitutes and earn more money. All the women answered that they work there because it’s a decent job, because they’re not tempted by higher earnings. That they’d rather be decent. To them prostitution is morally and religiously wrong, it’s “outside normality.”
When he asks women and men if the thought of sex gives them a feeling of anguish or happiness, the majority of men say happiness as opposed to only a few women. As we see through the film, the type of answers given depends on education and economic background. It is only when it comes to the “invert, or abnormal question of homosexuality” when they agree. They express feelings of disgust, of horror, repulsion and scorn, saying that it’s immoral, that the abnormality could have been prevented.
The documentary is structured in debates, each one in a particular place. For instance, the one on a Roman beach when he asks if marriage solves all sexual problems. A woman says it doesn’t. A young couple says it does. Young women say divorce is necessary. A young boy says no. Another says it is, another says it depends. On freedom for boys and girls, most girls said that they didn’t have as much as boys, but “it doesn’t matter.”
Halfway into the film Pasolini discovers his inquiry is undergoing a crisis, he thinks people’srespondslack intimacy and questions the authenticity of the answers. He goes back to a novelist, journalist and close friend of his, Alberto Moravia. He tells him he feels as if he were returning from a shocked world. He then asks him if he’s ever shocked. Moravia answers, “I could say stupidity shocks me, but even that’s not true. There’s always a possibility to understand things… what is understood doesn’t shock… a person is shocked because he sees something different from himself, hence threatening to himself… shock is basically fear. Conforming against our own instincts… a belief received without analysis accepted through tradition, laziness, and a passive education that leads to conformism.” With these words he gives valuable knowledge into the Italian mentality and forces us to think about the ideas that shape our ethics.
Pasolini goes back with more experiential questions to find the real Italy. And the responses once again vary. For example, on the Tuscan beach he asks a woman if marriage solved the sexual problem. She answered no, that she is pro-divorce. A man agreed, saying that marriage is monotonous and divorce is the answer. But another defended marriage, saying it was the sacred “family nucleus because it forms future citizens and nations, people with moral attitude.” Yet for another man the family nucleus is outdated. On the Roman beach an older woman said the woman must stay in her place and that the man wears the pants. While on a Milan beach most agreed that virginity is not necessary for marriage and divorce is a must. And finally on the Southern Beach everyone agreed, the woman must be chaste, must stay home, not work, and not go out alone.
This shows a wide range of answers, and one can arrive at the conclusion that their responses and ways of thinking depend on their education, age, tradition and cultural upbringing. But they also reflect a diverse spectrum of voices and images of a society that he wants to reveal. Pasolini said only young girls have ideas that defy conformism, giving the example of the girl that said she would want to go to a cafe by herself, and that it would be fine if her parents divorced.
In his inquiry, Pasolini documented a repressed society in a scientific way and began to unveil the real Italy by confronting the sex taboo. He leaves us with this question: Are men not interested in nothing but living? One can watch this film and arrive at different conclusions about expressing oneself intellectually and sexually, depending on our state of development. It’s certainly a problematic topic that resonates today as much as it did in 1963 Italy.
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Leticia Cortez is a teacher, writer, activist and loves film. She was born in Mexico and grew up in Chicago. She travels the art world, both in her imagination and in her book, art and film reviews. She writes political essays, short stories and poetry. Presently she teaches Latin American Literature in English and Spanish at St. Augustine College.