If you asked me - I don't know how it would come up, but just go with this - who I would pick to adapt Voltaire's 1759 novel Candide, I would never think to ask Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi.
But it happened.
Yes, the team that made Mondo Cane, Mondo Cane 2, Women of the World, Africa Blood and Guts and one of the hardest movies you will ever try to survive, Goodbye Uncle Tom.
It was the critical and commercial failure of that last movie that convinced the Jacopetti and Prosperi that maybe they should stop making mondo movies - well, Goodbye Uncle Tom does have them go back in time to the age of slavery in a magical helicopter, but it's shot with the real slaves of Papa Doc Duvalier, losing the plot before it even starts - and creating an actual narrative one.*
I wondered, as I watched what unfolded before me, if in their travels across the world, did Jacopetti and Prosperi check out not just people being brutalized and animals being destroyed, but also the midnight showings of films by Ken Russell and Alejandro Jodorowsky? Or at the very least, Federico Fellini.
Because that's the only way that this all makes sense.
Joined by screenwriter Claudio Quarantotto, film critic of Il Borghese, the idea and story came from Jacopetti. He believed in this film so much, but he just wasn't great with actors. That's where Prosperi came in, as he believed in Jacopetti.
Sadly, this movie would finally end their partnership.
Candido (Christopher Brown, who went from this to an episode of Bigfoot and Wildboy) lives in some unspecified time and is being raised in some unknown land by the Baron (Gianfranco D'Angelo, Io Zombo, Tu Zombi, Lei Zomba) in his castle Thunder-ten-Tronckh.
Beyond non-stop eating, drinking and partying - there's even a three-breasted woman years before Total Recall - he studies the philosophy of Dr. Pangloss (Jacques Herlin, Slap the Monster On Page One). All he has learned is optimism and that everything has a purpose, so his worldview is rosy at best.
Life is pretty good and then he gets caught facedown between the thighs of the Baron's daughter Cunegonda (Michelle Miller, who went from the Broadway stage to this movie and then to being one of the vampires in Leif Jonker's Darkness).
Exiled from the life of pleasure, Candido is drafted into an army that seems ill-equipped for a world that's much more modern on the outside than the first part of this movie has led us to believe. They put helmets on their heads and batter their way through stone walls, but that doesn't help them against a modern army equipped with machine guns and flamethrowers. Our protagonist barely escapes with his life. Unlike the army he's been conscripted into, he has no intention of dying just for an ideal.
At this point, Candido descends into a journey filled with multiple horrors, including Salvatore Baccaro** as an ogre who is trying to assault a dead girl; an army takes the Baron's castle and Cunegonda's virginity; Dr. Pangloss is hung by the Inquisition for not believing in original sin and he must rescue the slave Cocambo (Richard Domphe) by pretending to be his owner.
This all makes him doubt the cheery worldview of his now lynched mentor, as Candido opines, "This is not the best of all possible worlds," an inverse of the core message he once learned.
That's when he finally meets Cunegonda again, no longer pure after having at least 127 lovers - she can't remember right now - as well as two owners and four current boyfriends. She now loves violence for pleasure and is far from the ideal woman who has kept Candido's spirits alive through his endless quest.
Everybody decides to get on a ship bound for the New World, a place much better than wherever we are. Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Abraham Lincoln, Al Capone and Marylin Monroe are all here and alive. No, really. And so is Dr. Pangloss, alive and forgetting psychology, now making TV commericals and shouting, "Thank you for the new world which is certainly the best of all possible worlds."
In this unexplored place, is Cunegonda a porn star, a saint or both? Well, who can tell, because children are blowing themselves up with grenades in the hope of killing soldiers. We go from Northern Ireland to the Arab-Israeli conflict to a field of poppies made up of mutually assured destruction. It all ends just in time for young people to throw the symbols of the past - the cross, the hammer and sickle, the swastika - into a river.
Somehow, in all this insanity, it looks and sounds beautiful. Credit goes to cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini, who also shot The Last Match, Firestarter, Treasure of the Four Crowns, My Name Is Nobody and Short Night of Glass Dolls, and Riz Ortolani, the only man who could make the excesses of Jacopetti and Prosperi sound like symphonies, who can create a song called "Crucified Woman" that is a balm for the soul.
I've always said that there's a thin line between the arthouse and the grindhouse. This movie reminds me of this, a film full of sound and fury and big ideas and bigger images, all united by the message behind everything Jacopetti and Prosperi made together: the world is s***.
Nobody else could make this.
It reminds me of a story about my wife. She saw Super Mario Brothers the movie before she experiencing the video game, so when she got to play it, she wondered why Dennis Hopper wasn't in it.
I've never read Voltaire, so I'm probably going to negatively compare the book to the movie.
Somewhere in all this, Carla Mancini appears.
*Prosperi would make one more non-mondo movie, the absolute punch in the face that is The Wild Beasts. Jacopetti made two more movies, Operazione ricchezza and Un'idea della pace.
**Between The Beast In Heat, Caligula et Messaline, Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks and nearly ever other movie I've seen him in, do you think Baccaro was sad that he was typecast as a sexual assault-obsessed monster?
