THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS

While wandering the countryside, a pair of father-and-son vagabonds (played respectively by Italian cinema legend Totò, in his final major film role, and Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli) happen upon a talking crow who spouts Marxist philosophy and launches them on a freewheeling picaresque through time, space, and the margins of a rapidly modernizing Italy. A comic fable that balances heady ideas about religion, poverty, and class struggle with the irreverent slapstick sight gags of silent comedy, THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS finds Pasolini at his lightest yet as stingingly subversive as ever.

"Pasolini saw his characters as living in an inescapable social hierarchy. That’s very much the subject of THE HAWKS AND THE SPARROWS, which is the ultimate expression of Pasolini’s ‘free indirect discourse’ style of filmmaking. The film, which is concerned with the explicability of nature according to laws of cause and effect, feels driven by a notational abstraction that recalls Buñuel’s THE MILKY WAY. But it’s also livelier in the way that it looks at the battling forces of nature and ideology. Alternately caustic and gently comic, this melancholy film offers a beautiful parable of capitalistic change." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant