‘Four comic tales of 1960s European mores that still resonates today’
There was a bit of a vogue for auteur-led anthologies during the 1960s (Spirits of the Dead is still one of my favourites) and leading the way was the 1962 social satire, Let’s Wash Our Brains: RoGoPaG, which gave four leading directors (their names make up the title of the film) free range to reflect on sex, religion and social mores.
In Roberto Rossellini’s comedy of ill manners Chastity, an airline stewardess fights off the advances of a lecherous business man searching for his ideal woman, while Jean-Luc Godard shows off his New Wave stylistics in The New World, an existential satire about a couple falling out in a Paris gripped by the fear of a nuclear blast. La Ricotta finds Pier Paolo Pasolini mocking himself as a filmmaker (with Orson Welles standing in for the director) in a scandalous satire re-telling the Passion of Christ, while the final story, Free-Range Chicken, by Ugo Gregoretti, makes fun of a middle-class Italian family trapped by consumerist desires.
All four tales deal with the anxieties of a world undergoing great change, and each one reflects the vision of the individual directors. Pasolini’s controversial segment famously landed the gay, Marxist atheist a suspended prison sentence for being allegedly blasphemous (he’d probably be hanging out with Pussy Riot if he was still alive today), but it’s Gregoretti’s caustic comedy that really shines and is the most profound. Here, a marketing guru gives a seminar on the secret of getting consumers to buy things that they don’t really need. When you consider how certain computer companies operate today, it’s kind of prophetic – scary even.
The Masters of Cinema Series release is available on Blu-ray, in a Dual Format edition.
