Le clan des siciliens
Le clan des siciliensi is a very... how shall we put this, it's a film made by and for twelve year olds. It manages to capture the very stunted intellectual worldview typical of the prepubescent male, with its narrow perspective and the tell-tale difficulty of harmoniously handling higher-order effectsii splayed in all their nude glory.
Yet the twelve year old must be in fact rather thirteen, because the scene where the man catches an eel (ineptly called "poisson" in the scriptiii, but it's self-obviously and most respectably a fucking eel) while the woman rolls her underwear off her generous hips and lays herself out naked, lifting a calf under the burning gaze just like a cat would (if cats were women), and then the fellow approaches, dead eel dangling limply in his hands all the way to his ankles... how shall we put it...
Let's put it inside : it has all the sexuality that matters. Before it dies, sex is this thirteen year old boy affair, what can I tell you, impetuous and desperate, hopeless and incomprehending. She's in for a thrashing. It'll be anything but a sound thrashing, yet it she'll long remember, be it as technically unaccomplished as you like. That they gasp in horror and desist upon a small child showing up is oddly adequate, in context. Indeed, only a twelve year old boy fucks like that, running off mid-thrust to beg the child not tattle (to his mommy of all people!). Wouldn't you rather say along with me, "hey kiddo! tell your mom to come over!" ? Isn't that how it goes, isn't that how they're made, the kiddos ? Yet... you didn't say that when you were twelve, did you. Not that, nor anything like it. Twelve year olds don't own their environment, not the land, not the women upon it, it's how it goes.
It's a great fucking scene, it almost renders the whole pile of clingy blouses and pubescent bungheliiv somehow endearing.
———- 1969, by Henri Verneuil, with Jean Gabin, Alain Delon and the very perky titted, shapely assed Irina Demick. [↩]
- Why did the man come to Rome personally ? Once there, why did he waste his wristwatch when anything else'd have worked as well ?
These contradictions require a twelve year old boy to navigate -- how can that "New York mobster" be at the same time powerful and important, and also have the time to show up on "mysterious" adventure calls, just like a pre-internet preteen bored with the dreary nothingness at home, where all there ever is to do is homework ? How can he at the same time be an iconic 1970s man's man and not give a flying fuck about his wristwatch ? This is the sort of mentality that produces petty thieves, stunted children stuck trying to push mud uphill one spoonfull at a time, too myopic to see that inasmuch as the whole hill's made of mud in the first place, they're at most a very ineffectual moving part in a mud convection engine. [↩]
- "I've never seen any man kill a fish like that before."
"Then you haven't seen anything." [↩] - A Romanian word whose meaning is barely conveyable. Technically the word's a regional re-spelling of bumb (button), but the figurative sense of the past participle noun is something like... imagine trying to fuck without looking, without touching, it's this kinda-sorta affair, you keep poking in unexpected places. It'll resolve eventually, it has to, it's made to ; but until it does it'll be a great source of unintentional comedy and ample frustration, conveying the experience of the inexperienced wench trying to sew in a button, forming some expectations upon her activity on one side of the textile, and being well surprised by what that conveys on the other side. Ever been surprised of how an' which way a needle point came out ? [↩]
