Half A Man (1966)

 

a.k.a. Un Uomo a meta

Director: Vittorio De Seta

Screenplay: Vittorio De Seta, Fabio Carpi and Vera Gherarducci

Cast: Jacques Perrin as Michele; Lea Padovani as Madre di Michele; Gianni Garko as Fratello di Michele; Ilaria Occhini as Elena; Rosemary Dexter as Marina; Pier Paolo Capponi as Ugo; Francesca De Seta as Simonetta

An Abstract Candidate

 

A man in a suit, with a briefcase, is laid down in the grass of a recreational park. With psychological issues coming forward, he asks why he is there, beginning a trawl through past traumas. They involve his family and a potential love that reveals the isolation that he is in within his mind as well as to others. Halfway through the film, after seeing only fragments, we see how he became who is he is fully.

Vittorio De Seta is an Italian film maker I was introduced to when not as readily available as all filmmakers should be. De Seta is interesting in how, out of his films I have seen, Half a Man was an outlier for his career. A large portion of his legacy is not feature length or fiction, but a series of short documentaries christened the ten films of “The Lost World”, made in southern Italy and Sardinia between 1954 and 1959, and connect to his debut theatrical length film Bandits of Orgosolo (1961). Half a Man is a curious production for De Seta in hindsight, an abstract film which has such a drastic change of pace in his filmmaking history from before, something which does not stay to the legacy of a neo-realist whose career has been beforehand documenting the likes of fishermen in his homeland. As one would hope, however, the outlier for a director is fascinating and this particular case is special, fully investing into how these types of films are still personal for their creators, De Seta producing it, but with an exceptional final result here.  

The film plays off with a languid tone as the viewer is drip fed new memories. Shot in black and white, it has a woozy poetic tone as it shifts between what is imagined and what is actually happening, and even as a film I have had to see in digitized rips over the years, i.e. unavailable with a print version which was not great, it is all deliberate and exceptional to see. The plot as it is becomes very simple when put together – with neurosis over a women in his life named Elena, our lead Michele (Jacques Perrin) has been placed in a mental health clinic for the eventual breakdown, caused when there was another man in her life and an ill advised yacht trip lead to him committing violent act with an implement through a bare foot. Michele’s health issues stem from his youth before, with his domineering mother and his older popular brother who was a war hero, the film connected to World War II with how the older brother’s standing is greater fighting for his country whilst Michele stayed at home.  Michele, who barely talks, has struggled with more than one woman he has been attracted to his whole life, and that in itself has factored into the many weights on his mind.

It is clear, as De Seta’s documentaries were as natural to their subjects as possible, that he wanted to make a film that is intentionally alien in presentation, with slow motion and slow paced editing to create a dramatic effect. The sense of a documentary filmmaker is making the film is clear by how he makes sure the scenes do not feel artificial but environments and moments you are drawn into. It is however also clear, in how the film is shot, that he is cutting loose, to use a blunt point, with a tone and style to match the absolute ill ease on hand, most shots insanely striking and the mood at ill-ease. Everything is amiss, with sexual repression involved, the dominating presence of Christianity, by way of how his mother welds it, enforced when she reprimands him for perceived lustful acts with a woman he is smitten for. It even gets into something more uncomfortable by, in one scene, having this woman of his then-dreams replaced on a swing near him with a twelve year old girl. There is also how children in this tale, having to live in a place where children are being cared for by a German maid under his mother’s watchful eye, are figures he is fascinated by, with no hidden sinister nature to his gaze, but they themselves unsettling in their appearance with how the film shots them in context. For all their innocence too, these child characters are also shown to be world weary as they talk among themselves of how initially he is being lead along by the woman, from a well off family, who has had to taken shelter in their place mid-war.

Ennio Morricone, able to shift into varying types of Italian cinema, contributes one of his most avant-garde scores to fit the nature of the film, drones and atmospheric sounds that adds to the sense the film is from the main character's self-analysing mind. This is just one of the many likely unknown to people considering how prolific the legendary composer was and, having fallen under his spell for his incredible work with Sergio Leone’s westerns, it rewards me the more I see of his career in cinema how Morricone could vary himself between giallo thrillers to contributing these abstract scores through his filmography.

The central drama itself is immensely engaging. At times even unable to say a word, the protagonist Michele is literally half a man, the favourite of the father who is not there, hated by his mother, the past revealed to the viewer showing that he is damaged by his upbringing but as much the result of who he is as a person since he was born, alien to the world. His horror, as we see the images in an unsettling amount of slow motion, of the act of hunting birds for sport with the family, emphasises that he is disconnected to his own lineage and isolated. The characterisation has been seen before in many other films - of the mother disappointed in her son, the superior older brother, the distant and antisocial younger son - but the tone of the film gives the drama more effect because the abstract tone forces you to engage with the drama more when it is finally given to you. After abrupt images of birds falling out the sky in slow motion are first seen, the original context of such images later makes them even more striking when tied to a key point in the character's memories. It is a shame the film is as obscure as it has felt for me, as this fascinates as De Seta, gaining his acclaim for his work in documentary, committed as much to this project he helped co-write, showing his voice was as committed to a project entirely outside his work from before. What he makes, fully feeling like the logical progression of how the vastness of a novel can be interpreted in the medium of cinema by the latter’s techniques, is the kind of intense, minimalist drama comparable to Michelangelo Antonioni, that is far more rewarding in that it makes the route of the truths as rewarding as the reasons behind the characters themselves.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Psychodrama

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium