Elio Petri’s Property is No Longer a
Theft may at times seem overly didactic and single-minded, but then it’s
dealing with a subject that properly continues to inspire such obsessive frustration –
the all-pervading, all-defining influence of capitalism, such that it’s unclear
whether “I am” and “I have” can be meaningfully distinguished as forms of
identification. It’s embodied here by Ugo Tognazzi’s Macellaio, who continues
to work a day job in his butcher shop (a bit improbably perhaps, but the recurring
association with raw meat makes its own point) while amassing a huge portfolio
of property and material assets, much of it in some way shady, so that when Total,
a former bank clerk, keeps on targeting him as a subject of (relatively petty)
theft, Macellaio's main concern is about the police getting too close. Macellaio
embodies the self-righteousness that’s only become more prominent since then,
certain that his defining role in the structure absolves him of all other sins
(of course, his self-justification of himself in Biblical terms omits any
consideration of the passage about a camel going through the eye of a needle) –
his sexuality is as much a matter of distorted commodification as everything else,
with his mistress explicitly viewing herself as a worker who clocks in and out.
At the same time, it’s persuasively suggested that society relies almost as
much on petty criminals, not least because they provide a constant stream of
easy distraction from what the real crooks are getting away with. Total, meanwhile,
obtains little gratification or lasting benefit from his actions – he’s even
afflicted with an allergy to money itself, its proximity sending him into
chronic itching. At various times Petri disrupts the reality to have the main
characters address the audience directly from a disembodied space, although you
might argue the film hardly needs such accusatory Brechtian underlining. Still,
the cumulative effect is suitably, drainingly powerful.
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