Love Meetings (1965)

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

A lot of fun.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

In this documentary, Pasolini travels around Italy and interviews random people in public places about their attitudes towards sexuality, marriage, and gender issues. It's fascinating to hear how Italians in the early 1960s felt about these topics, and there are plenty of opinions that seem shocking from a modern perspective. There are people who think that divorce should be illegal (they'd rather have spouses kill each other), parents who find it perfectly normal for 14 year-old boys to lose their virginity with a prostitute, and women who think it's only right that they have less rights and freedoms than men. It's especially interesting to hear the interviewees confess their unabashed disgust towards homosexuals to the secretly gay director.However, I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't have been more interesting to include some interviews that weren't conducted in public places with groups of people standing around. As it stands, the movie gets a bit repetitive after a while and probably would have been more effective with a shorter running time.

Pier Paolo Pasolini always has a streak of the documentary filmmaker somewhere in his body of work, where he usually went for expressing his poetic viewpoint on the lower classes (i.e. Mamma Roma) and, later on, the dark fables and tawdry tales of Oedipus Rex and Arabian Nights. If Love Meetings, his only straight documentary feature, isn't completely impressive it may be because in the little moments when he tries for something poetic, oddly enough, like in the numbered transitions, it doesn't really work as well. Those little bits come off as dated 60s stuff. On the contrary though when Pasolini simply takes to the street with a 16mm and a microphone and asks people directly about sex and women's roles and homosexuality and fidelity and freedoms related to all of the above then it gets really interesting. In fact, for a movie relegated to Italian cities and countrysides, with sound-bytes from across the spectrum from college kids to professors (and author Alberto Moravia early on) to farmers in the fields, and done so on the fly and in classic cinema verite style, it doesn't usually feel very old fashioned.Much of what's discussed and dug up by Pasolini (who reveals himself wonderfully here as a solid journalist, something I would have liked to have seen more of in his career after seeing this) can be relatable for today's youth, if only as a cohesive set of opinions and viewpoints and occasional factoids on standards set between men and women and privacy and liberation and so on. To be sure some of it is stuck in its time and place (practically all of the children asked "Where do babies come from?" say the stork, or something involving God or other). But a lot of it is so absorbing because of the generous flow of ideas- it's a wonderfully edited piece, as sometimes crudely constructed as it is, which is part of the point as a true independent production- and Pasolini's determination to get as much as he can at the heart or whatever at sexual relations and societal norms and what's changed over time in Italy and if there can be any more change in the future. It's probably the most obvious example from the director to screen in a sociology class. 8.5/10

would have been halfway interesting, weren't for the repetitive communist jargon thrown at the spectator at every turn. his overwhelming arrogance supersedes any legitimate intention in understanding his country's cultural differences. from the few movies i've seen, the less the documentary maker interferes with the subject of his investigation, the more interesting the outcome. right there he failed miserably. watch this if you consider yourself a communist or are a die hard Michael Moore fan. this might even make you change your views regarding those subjects a bit. if you consider yourself Italian... well, then. this is a MUST SEE. might also make you rethink a thing or two.

I too was disappointed, but not for the reasons cited in the previous comment.Instead, I found the film very hard to follow, with lots of academic buzzwords (interviewer Pasolini refers to "the sex problem" at least 20 times), not all of it subtitled, and subtitles that faded out of legibility against light backgrounds. The movie was visually unappetizing, in part because of inconsistent and often inept camera work, and in part because of a sloppy transfer to tape that washed out the middle tones and often made it hard to see and read people's faces.The most annoying element was the recurrent muting of the voice tracks (and of course the accompanying sub-titles) that was labeled "self-censorship." Was this a comment on official censorship of the time? I get the impression that the most interesting answers were lost to the audience through this process.An interesting and meaty idea from a provocative and often great filmmaker, undercut by directorial inexperience and poor repackaging.