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User Reviews for: Don't Torture a Duckling

Buffy Anne
CONTAINS SPOILERS10/10  7 months ago
From the outset, prominence is given to a range of sexually promiscuous and “mystical” females as potential suspects, including Maciara (Florinda Bolkan), whose alchemic beliefs and marginalization from extended kinship structures in the village ensure, in the words of Mikel Koven, that “She holds a liminal position within community as both insider and outsider”
The tension within the film is often regarding the villagers’ resistance or ambiguity toward modernity as a specific mode of “alien” Northern advancement. Indeed, this disjuncture is also evident in Riz Ortolani’s strident opening score, which mixes a jagged classical string composition with a traditional Italian folk ballad as if to signify an aural incompatibility between modernism and its macabre Other.
Rather than functioning in isolation, the pivotal role that Fulci’s film attributes to female transgression extends beyond Bolkan’s character, to include Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet), who is also a suspect for the child killings, due to the sexually inappropriate relations that she has with a number of young males in the movie.
Spatial dichotomy comes to take on distinctly gendered connotations that exceed the film’s disjuncture between the rational modernistic structures of (masculine) advancement/surveillance and the feminist, fleshy, irrational landscape. The female association to the landscape extends to include a psychic and libidinal dimension that utilizes the use of infantile cries to puncture the soundtrack during Maciara’s frequent excavations of the soil.
The Mezziogorno giallo uses landscape (and its association with the female body and its irrationalities) to add an important psychic dimension into the Southern picturesque.
It is further evidenced by the disenchanted Milanese police inspector who finds Maciara bludgeoned to death by the side of the new motorway after locals have wrongly assumed she is the child-killer. As he comments, “A horrible crime … bread of ignorance and superstition. We construct gleaming highways, but we are a long way from modernizing the mentality of people like this.” Although the resolution of the film reveals the child killer to be the local priest Don Alberto Avallone (Marc Porel), the associations between repressed transgression and the “feminine” remain prominent by virtue of the assailant’s attire and family connections.
The ambiguity of gender with regard to the priest’s cassock also points to an ambiguity of gender with regard to priests themselves.—They are born men, but cannot live “like men,” from a heteronormative context of Italian masculinity and machismo.
Although I would argue that the Mezziogorno giallo has yet to receive extended theorization in accounts of the genre, it remains significant for representing the rural space to explore wider sexual and social tensions within the national psyche. In these narratives, the conflation of unresolved psychic aberration with an “untamed” landscape facilitates a kind of return of the rural repressed, where the environment and its inhabitants come to signify a monstrous mode of expression that must remain submerged within the civilized Northern consciousness. This paradoxical strategy of revering the rural space, while condemning its protagonists has long-standing historical foundations because of which … the South appeared to be a “paradise inhabited by devils.” The South was a marvellous and happy land, while the inhabitants were savages. The immoral behaviour and lack of civilisation were precisely the product of the climate and the pleasant and attractive countryside which made it possible to live in a state of nature, a primitive contentment allowing only for the most extreme and basic passions.
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