Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981)

Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981, It/Fr.) (aka Storie di Ordinaria Follia, or Conte De La Folie Ordinaire)

Italian director Marco Ferreri's erotic drama and compelling love story was adapted from German/American beat poet Charles Bukowski's short story The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, found in his 1972 fictional work Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness.

The semi-autobiographical, self-indulgent film was basically a tale of the life of the boozing philosopher Bukowski (and his alter-ego Henry Chinaski) through the film's main character. An alcoholic, aspiring poet-lecturer and outcast who was leading a life of sexual depravity, found his soul-mate in Los Angeles - a self-mutilating, masochistic and exploited hooker who was gorgeous but suicidally destructive.

The controversial author Bukowski had a cult following for his short stories, novels, essays, and poetry. Two other films with Bukowski-based characters included: Barfly (1987) with Mickey Rourke, and Factotum (2005) with Matt Damon.

• the film opened to introduce the character of often-inebriated Charles Serking (Ben Gazzara), a self-destructive, womanizing, meandering, and alcoholic writer/poet with a renegade spirit, and on the verge of sexual depravity
• during a traveling lecture tour to showcase his poetry in NYC, Charles was presenting a recital of his philosophical and poetic works to a small and rude, restless and disrespectful audience, as he drank booze from a brown bag: "Style is the answer to everything - a fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art. Bullfighting can be an art. Boxing can be an art. Loving can be an art. Opening a can of sardines can be an art. Not many have style. Not many can keep style. I have seen dogs with more style than men - although not many dogs have style. Cats have it with abundance."
• backstage in the massive performance hall, Charles found a short, blonde 12 year-old Runaway female (Wendy Welles) who had set up for herself a makeshift bedroom with a clothesline. He asked: "Are you real?" After he told her he was returning to Los Angeles by bus the next day, she enthusiastically kissed him and begged for him to take her to Hollywood; he felt both of her breasts with his two hands, and then took a peek, and quickly suspected she was older than 12: "Just what I thought - your tits are too big. They're at least eight years old apiece. That adds up to 16. You liar." She replied: "Sometimes I just say I'm 12. I can be anything I want. I'm almost 14 actually." She sat on his lap as he sang her a lullaby - 'Rock-a-Bye-Baby.'
• when he later awoke, he discovered that she had run out on him after emptying his pockets and robbing him of his Greyhound bus ticket back cross-country to Los Angeles; she left him with one pair of her panties on the line that he stuffed into his pocket
• after returning to Los Angeles after a 1,600 mile bus trip home, he mused (in voice-over) about the 'City of Angels': "I had come to the conclusion that the touring poet act was a mistake, but then again, my life's been one big one, so I've been told. Luckily, I had a couple of fifties stashed and bought a bus ticket home. Forty-two hours and sixteen hundred miles of concrete later, I hit the streets of Los Angeles. Some call it 'Lost Angels.' Me. I was just another one of the lost back where I belonged. Back in L.A. I could have kissed the ground. I resisted the impulse. Besides, it was drink I craved, and I had to get back to my part of town - Hollywood. Everybody thinks it's the playground of the stars, but they pushed on years ago. Now it's my kind of place - dangerous - a hardcore turf of pimps, whores, no class rip-off artists, and other shattered types entertaining fantasies too desperate to mention, just naked reality twenty-four hours a day. I've always had a love affair with the streets"
• after an absence of six weeks, he returned to his flophouse on LA's seedy skid-row - a squalid one-room apartment, where he engaged in an argument with his landlady and ex-wife Vicky (Tanya Lopert); she complained about his incessant alcoholism, and how she had covered for his 'bar tab' debts
• at Venice Beach, CA, he happened to encounter a punkish blonde to whom he was immediately and animalistically attracted - described in voice-over: "Waiting on the next tumble of the dice, I made Venice Beach with a six-pack and hit the jackpot when I spotted this blonde number. She was that rare kind who gives you an instant hard-on. All sexual sleaze with an ass like a wild animal. My kind of game. She was radiating heat, putting out signals and I was hooked. I followed her. What the hell else could I do? My blood was up"

• he pursued the trashy blonde Vera (Susan Tyrrell) (wearing a short black blouse and a torn leopard-print sarong-skirt and matching choker) to a bus stop and then trailed her back to her place; once inside, he ripped open her blouse to reveal her sexy black bra; when she fell to the floor limp, he stripped open the rest of her clothing, revealing black garters and no panties; she suddenly recuperated and stood up, gorged herself with a large phallic bite from his peeled banana, and then aggressively kissed him before she wrapped her legs around him, and they engaged in sex on her bed

• afterwards, when asked how she liked the sex, she replied: "I like being raped"; he called her a cock-teaser - prompting her to request S&M as she smoked a cigarello: "I want you to be mean to me. Next time I want you to use your belt"; she supplied him with a wide black belt and then ordered: "Come on, Tiger, whip me. I want you to beat me before you stick it in!"; but then when he walked from behind the bar and showed that he was wearing speedo briefs illustrated with a gun and holster, she mockingly laughed at him: "Look at his little gun!"
• then, while he took a hot bath, she gave him a promised "big surprise"; she reported him to the police that he had molested her ("He forced me to have oral sex with him"); the authorities arrived and arrested him - he amused himself by calling it "carnal violence" - (voice-over) "She ate me up like an enchilada and spit me into a police car"; however, the next day, she dismissed the charges
• then, in a bar, Charles found another sexual connection with a second damaged female who was rated as "devastating" -- Cass (Ornella Muti), a glamorous barfly-prostitute with a cruel pimp (Patrick Hughes); she was sado-masochistic (with self-mutilating actions), and had low self-esteem; she was melancholic and suicidal, and claimed she was an orphan who grew up in a convent

• at the bar counter, she demonstrated her self-destructive urges by thrusting or impaling herself with a giant safety pin inserted through both facial cheeks; in his apartment, he recited for her what he had most recently typed on his typewriter: "'Love,' he said. 'Kiss me. Kiss my lips, kiss my hair, my fingers, my cock, my balls, my eyes, my brains. Make me forget.'"

• the next morning during a reddish dawn, the outcast and misfit Charles spoke the word "Love" when reaching orgasm with Cass for the first time while taking her from behind as she was bent over and bottomless at a window
• later, Cass returned in an elegant black dress and demanded exclusive sex from him: "I want to be f--ked until I have nothing left for the others, nothing"; he non-chalantly responded: "You want me to service you, huh?"; when she attempted to pay him, he slapped her and grabbed her with a prophetic statement: "I'll kill you, do you understand?" She continued with lustful demands: "I'm paying for this. Now lay down and take your pants off, slave! (He obliged her by lying on a mattress on the floor) Now, give it to me! Take my soul with your cock!"
• in the next scene, Cass had been jailed for hustling and she called Charles to bail her out; after her release, he bluntly told her: "You can go f--k yourself"; she left an ink thumb imprint on his forehead and declared: "Now you're my man - forever"; he spoke in a voice-over about her dangerous allure: "Cass had that special look that got to me. Like she'd been blown away by the winds of eternity and was swimming back against the current. There was something mysterious going on and I plunged right in. I was in over my head, my mind kept telling me. I had to come up for some air. But Cass was like fluid fire and her flesh had already sucked me in. I had to get away from her before I got burned. But that was like trying to climb out of a whirlpool"
• Charles paid for the sexual services of an obese Widow (Judith Drake) who lived in the same apartment complex as Vera; afterwards in the living room, Charles told her about his hidden wish to return to the womb: "I had this friend once. He had this desire, this obsession to return to his mother's womb. And one day that obsession became a reality"; she spread her legs on the floor and he dove in - to try and hide inside of her; she encouraged him: "It's OK, come to me, my baby"; he then admitted as tears flowed from his eyes: "It wasn't true. I made it up"
• his voice-over described his own despairing life, as he escaped by visiting a homeless shelter to mingle comfortably with other "real people" - drunks and "defeated" low-lifes such as himself: (voice-over) "Ever heard the sound of one mouth screaming? I had for years - my own. I didn't want to go home. I didn't want to see anybody. I just needed to be invisible for a few days, to get down in the dirt, lose myself with all the others: the defeated, the demented and the damned. They are the real people of this world and I was proud to be in their company"
• meandering around, he commented on the madness and insanity of life and his own illusory and "meaningless" existence with no other alternative but to "laugh or cry"; he found himself completely down-and-out, perpetually drunk, and sleeping in used cars in a sales-lot; he also spoke about God and death to two other drunks on Venice Beach: "As long as you don't believe in God, ya got nothin' to sweat. You're just along for the ride. Death isn't good and death isn't bad. It's just the Joker in the deck. There's worse things, anyway, like living with someone you don't like, or working eight hours on a job you hate, that's definitely worse than death."
• later, he met up with Cass again in the bar, who said she had returned to hustling; in his apartment, he placed his head in her lap and again asked for her to kiss him: "Make me forget"; the two spent a short idyllic time together in a beach guesthouse - a place where he used to write; he watched as she fed the seagulls at the beach - naked from the waist down; Charles professed his love for her, calling her "the most alive woman I've ever met"; he asked: "Will you marry me?", but she only answered with a kiss; then, she suddenly disappeared after they made love on the beach's sand bar; he described how he could feel that she had "a mortal wound in her soul"
• he found her back in his apartment, where he had received a letter from a major publishing house in NYC, with a job offer that would take him away from her; he proposed to bring her to NY if things looked good: ("Maybe your luck's turned around"); she cried, fearing to lose him; he discovered that her crotch area was bloody; Cass revealed that she had stitched her vagina shut with her large safety pin - she told him about her genital self-mutilation when she feared that she'd lose him: "I've closed it. For you and for everybody. Forever"; h e removed the large safety pin from her bloody groin area, and then nervously fled next-door to Vicky's emptied apartment
• after traveling to NY and being offered a job at Worldwind Publishing, Charles quickly became disillusioned with the uninspiring, sickly lime green-colored office cubicle he was assigned, and spent his time guzzling beer; he soon returned to Los Angeles ("I was back to square zero"), and returned to his favorite bar where the pimp had a new prostitute in tow; he learned that Cass had suicidally killed herself (by slashing her own throat) during his absence; he hugged her inside her open coffin in a Catholic mortuary, told her "You're too beautiful," and then spiraled downward into a drinking bout: (voice-over) "When the bottom drops out, it's a terrifying ride. Throughout my life, I'd always challenged the death of the soul of everybody - the fools, the fiends, the friends, the fakers. My mouth has always been big, but I like to think my words are beautiful, but now there were no words, only emptiness, and I was blinded by the embers of memory and a million thoughts about the most beautiful girl in town. She was gone. Cass - that whore of an angel who flew too close to the ground and crashed."
• in the film's conclusion, he attained some catharsis and peace when he returned to the beachhouse where he had experienced some idyllic moments with Cass; as he stumbled up to the beachhouse, he passed a young "Girl on the Beach" (Katya Berger) who was feeding the seagulls; he noticed that she was watching him from afar with some concern
• when she approached him in the beachhouse and asked: "Will you read me a poem?" and then on the beach asked: "Where does poetry come from?", he bargained: "You show me your titties and I'll compose a poem. Just for you"; she ran to the water's edge and down the beach, where he followed; she shouted out to him: "Come to my island, come on, come. You might know all about poetry, but you don't know the road"; he staggered after her, and then began to spout bits of original poetry to the admiring young female: "And the sun wields mercy. It's like a torch carried too high. And the jets whip across its sight and the rockets leap like toads. Peace is no longer, for some reason, precious. Madness drifts like lily pads on a pond, circling senselessly. (The girl stripped off her blouse and skirt to reveal her nakedness from a short distance) The painters paint, dipping their reds and greens and yellows. Poets rhyme their loneliness. Musicians starve as always. And novelists miss the mark. But not the pelican, the gull. (He reached out to touch her breasts) Pelicans dip and dive. (He sunk to his knees and hugged her body) Rise shaking, shocked, half-dead, radioactive fish in their beaks. The sky breaks red and orange. Flowers open as they have always opened, but covered with a thin dust of rocket fuel and mushrooms - poison mushrooms. And in a million rooms, lovers lie entwined, and lost, and sick as peace. Can't we awaken? Must we forever, dear friends, die in our sleep"