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119 Overrated Solutions L’humanité One of my favorite Italian novels, long out of print in English, is a sort of Roman police procedural in which the central crime never gets solved: Carlo Emilio Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (1946). It’s so beloved in Italy that it has a nickname, Il pasticciaccio, and when Gadda died in 1973 at the age of eighty, it had gone through several editions; William Weaver’s English translation of 1965 was based on the seventh. Weaver, who wrote that ‘‘Il pasticciaccio occupies in contemporary Italian literature the position that Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Man Without Qualities occupy in the literature of their respective countries,’’ also noted that a good many of Gadda’s other fictional works are ‘‘unfinished, but not incomplete. Even the briefest of Gadda’s fragments has its own curious wholeness ; and if the ‘murder story’ aspect of Il pasticciaccio remains unresolved, one feels—at the end of this long, apparently ambling work—that it is better not to know who is responsible for the death of Signora Liliana. The reader feels that he has probed deeply enough already into the evil and horror of the world and that yet another, worse revelation of it would be more than the reader, the author, and the protagonist [Detective] Ingravallo could bear. Though students of Gadda’s work might not agree, one also suspects that his novels were born to be fragments, like certain imaginary ruins in Venetian painting, perfect parts of impossible wholes.’’ On a reviewer’s holiday last month, I went to see Pietro Germi’s 1959 adaptation of Il pasticciaccio, The Facts of Murder, at the Film Center and was disappointed but not surprised to find the plot ‘‘resolved,’’ the murderer uncovered. Consequently, what registers as a feeling of infinite expansion in the range of material embraced by the novel becomes not only finite in the film but ultimately forgettable and disposable. On its own terms, the movie has many virtues, but the experience it offers is profoundly dissimilar. This has led to some reflections on a few of the fundamental differences between novels and movies as they exist in the world. Kafka is allowed to leave all his novels unfinished—and, indeed, might not even be valued as much today if he’d forced conclusions on Amerika, The Trial, or The Castle. But Welles is castigated by most of his biographers for leaving a few of his films unfinished, and 120 ESSENTIAL CINEMA Eyes Wide Shut is automatically diminished in some people’s eyes for not having been fully mixed by Kubrick before he died. Similarly, we tolerate some paintings and symphonies having been left unfinished but not movies because what we call their ‘‘formal’’ demands—and what might actually just be the dictates of the business—necessitate a certain closure. Thanks to this artistic double standard, I would argue that there are certain films that would be better—artistically better, philosophically better, and existentially more honest—if they had been left unfinished. Unfortunately, the business of film distribution dictates that the unfinished films are generally the ones we don’t get to see (Welles is a prime example), and consequently the ones we wind up seeing are all finished—a fact that obviously affects our expectations. Or, to view the problem somewhat differently, some films out of necessity only pretend to be finished while their real virtues are inextricably bound up with their un- finished states. Foremost among the latter is Bruno Dumont’s powerful second feature, L’humanité—another police procedural—playing this week at Facets Multimedia Center. I hasten to add that the mystery in this case is solved at the end, but maybe it shouldn’t have been. Dumont himself seems open to this possibility when he writes the following, in notes about the film distributed to the press: [Jean-Pierre] Melville used to say that the cop genre was a good vehicle. A police investigation is a sound movement . . . a dialectic: the quest for truth in a concrete and common expression, where it is innocently at work. The discovery doesn’t really matter. What counts is the movement: looking. I would argue, moreover, that Dumont’s film is ‘‘unfinished’’ in the sense that some paintings are; that is, some parts of the ‘‘canvas’’ are only sketched in while other parts are fully realized. As a mannerist portraiture of a...

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