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THE WORKS OF TINTO BRASS

Erotic and Commercial Experiments—Continued

Snack Bar Budapest

(1988)

Poster designed by Guazzi

“This is by Tinto Brass?” That was my silent question from the film’s first frame. Brass’s films are warm and personal. Snack Bar Budapest is ice-cold and impersonal. This seems to have been a commercial venture designed only to make money.

IMAGINARY DIALOGUE

PRODUCER: We just bought the rights to this hot new novel. Could you put L’uomo che guarda on hold and do a commercial thriller instead?

TINTO BRASS: Maybe.

PRODUCER: We want lots of suspense, lots of gunfights, lots of blood, lots of sex. We want a seedy atmosphere, electronic rock music. We want a big hit, a blockbuster. Can you do it?

TINTO BRASS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If that’s what you want, I can do it. Give me a deadline.

And he did it! Scored with moody electronic jazz/rock music by Zucchero, filled with dark rooms lit by blue neon, and consisting only of heartless characters, this is simply not what one would expect to pour forth from Brass’s editing suite. The story has a disbarred Lawyer, recently released from the slammer and now involved with organized crime, taking Milena, who is both his girlfriend and his partner Sapo’s girlfriend, to a hospital in Ostia for an overnight abortion. He checks into a pension called the Snack Bar Budapest where Sapo instructs him by phone to make contact with the up-and-coming local kingpin, a 19-year-old punk-pimp-gangster named Molecola (Italian for “molecule”), who is a Buffalo-trained politician trying to run out the mom-and-pop shops and turn the town into a giant casino-entertainment complex, with the Snack Bar as the centerpiece. The Lawyer (he has no other name) accepts the job of ridding the town of the Snack Bar’s owners, a father, mother, and teenage daughter he had once represented in court. Objecting to the torture inflicted upon mommy by Pappera, one of Molecola’s thugs, the Lawyer bludgeons him to death. In revenge, Molecola and his hookers turn on the pension with rapid-fire pistols. Though the Lawyer and Sapo win out against the poor aim of the hopelessly untrained gunners, they are too late to rescue Milena, who had been strangled to death just after her abortion, apparently by Molecola’s gang.

Snack Bar Budapest uses a formula that almost always works. It consists of two parts: if you (1) go to pains to establish that your story is believable, you can then (2) add the most preposterous ingredients and your audience will still buy it. And here, after an hour and a half, we just accept that a bunch of coked-up hookers, still dressed in their skimpy come-on outfits, are happy to send streams of badly aimed bullets into a hotel. It works! The same holds true with the news media. Journalists—of all political persuasions—follow this formula every day to make us believe whatever their big bosses want us to believe. And it works!

I doubt the film earned a profit, but I’m not sure. This could easily have been the sort of sleaze that the Hollywood studios vomit forth all the time. It is with embarrassment that I admit I used to work in cinemas, and for years and years I had to deal with the ugly crime pics that kept being shoved at me. Despite their poor earning power, it is still dogma that they are staples of the box office’s diet. I can’t even remember most of the crap that I saw or that I had to force-feed our audiences. But here, with a distinguished professor given a kindergarten assignment, we have a film that looks far more smooth and slick than anything we get from our studio hacks, and it puts to shame the garbage that plagues our movie screens. In a sense, it’s exquisite. Brass was hired to make a thriller, and boy did he make a thriller. But it’s not exactly a feel-good movie, if you get my drift. Unlike most of Brass’s films, the focus is on the men, but unlike Yankee, this is hardly a celebration of machismo. Anyway, like some other Brass movies that disappointed me at first, I found myself becoming addicted over the following few weeks. There’s something about his movies that just grows on you (or at least on me).

MOMENTS WORTH WATCHING FOR: Tinto Brass plays the confused judge (with a Hitler mustache), and his wife Tinta is also behind the bench. In another scene, Osiride Pevarello plays a monk who visits the ballroom at Molecola’s brothel and has a great time dancing with the girls. The unexpected appearances of Osiride Pevarello constitute my favorite running gag in Brass’s films. When Molecola takes his thugs to attack a local cinema, the Cine Tabù, he says that he hopes the Lawyer enjoys “porn” films. And what is this “porn” film playing there? Why, The Key, of course! You can’t miss the close-up of the motor scooter’s license plate: TB 8 1567. I wonder what those first two letters stand for. And then Molecola’s license plate is TB 51 2254. Hey.

TWO GREAT ACTORS YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE AND WILL PROBABLY NEVER HEAR OF AGAIN: François Négret had appeared a year or so earlier in Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, with probably his real voice. Here he’s dubbed into Italian, and he is just perfect as the overly demonstrative crime boss. He’s supposed to be 19, but he looks more like 15 or 16. You won’t forget him. And Valentine Demì, who bears an undeniable and probably deliberate resemblance to Tim Curry’s Frank-n-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, has a powerful stage presence as well as an innate comic gift. According to Cybercore, though, apart from this movie she seems to have done little other than porn—soft and hard. Too bad. With a good rôle, she’d command any audience’s full attention. She’s a dynamo. She turns up again in Paprika (as Valentine Demy), but, strangely, without so much as a hint of that magnificent stage presence.


The phenomenal François Négret

The phenomenal Valentine Demì

ROBERTO LERICI. This was the final collaboration between Tinto Brass and playwright Roberto Lerici, who would die just a few years later. In the future, without Giancarlo Fusco or Roberto Lerici on hand, Brass began to repeat himself. Now, that’s not a bad thing, not at all. But it does seem to indicate that Brass really missed his fellow brainstormers.

TECHNICAL NOTES: The VHS edition was electronically matted at about 1.85:1, which is too small but doesn’t look bad at all. The print used in the transfer was a circulating theatrical print, with grease-pencil cue marks every 15 minutes or so. While the film has no heart, it has technical ultraprecision. And that makes me wonder why there are two mistaken camera moves during the opening credits, which was probably the easiest and least expensive shot in the film. Why didn’t the crew take 15 minutes to re-shoot it? Odd. The rest of the film is technically flawless.

Tinta Brass

QUESTIONS: The voice that comes out of Philippe Léotard’s mouth is the same as the voice that came out of Alberto Lupo’s mouth in Action. And it looks as though François Négret delivered his lines in French. So who dubbed the voices? And can anyone help us identify the actors?

Italian DVD, allegedly wrongly cropped at 1.85:1. No idea about language options. PAL, which will not play on most US equipment.

The British Region-2 PAL DVD, which will not play on most US equipment. Correctly transferred at 1.66:1. Optional English subtitles. No extras. Note the plagiarized summary on the web site, which I have told the folks at Arrow about several times, to no avail. (I really don’t usually mind when people plagiarize me, if they only take a few sentences or paragraphs here and there. But when they don’t understand my jokes, I get upset.)

NoShame Films promised to release this on DVD in the US sooner or later, but I think they closed down.

STUFF ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF THE POPULAR 1987 NOVEL:
Clarence—Autori A–L: Lodoli
Ipse dixit: Marco Lodoli
Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina Sala Mostre: 9 November, Marco Lodoli
And the always-expected dead link:
http://www22.mondadori.com/panorama/numeri/pan2997/2997_cassetta.html

STUFF ABOUT THE MUSIC:
Blue: Unofficial Site of Zucchero Sugar Fornaciari
MusicalStore.it: Zucchero
And the dead links:
http://www.directmedia.ch/d/music/zucchero.cfm
http://www22.mondadori.com/panorama/numeri/pan2997/2997_cassetta.html
http://www.bluesoul.it/eng/duet.htm

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH:
Miss Italia Pageant 1983: Raffaella Baracchi

ANICA — Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive e Multimediali

Giovanni Bertolucci, Galliano Juso e Reteitalia presentano
un film di Tinto Brass