What never ceases to fascinate me of the films made in the fortunate decade that starts around the end of the Sixties and conventionally ends with the infamous production experience of Heaven’s Gate, is that on top of being daring both technically, visually, and narratively, they are weird to the bones in a way that we have almost forgotten. Or at least largely has contemporary cinema.
Using the disturbing imagery of an industrial poultry farming machinery as a loosely metaphorical background, Death Laid an Egg follows a typical love triangle degenerating from boring daily inertia to havoc. As the theme of genetic manipulation is randomly dropped to provide some sort of secondary narrative leverage, the final part of the film gets a little clunky and unfocused. But what still makes it successful, and so inherently unsettling, are not its preposterous avian features, but rather the inner contradictory monstrosity of all its characters. A tormented man helplessly cornered by a convenient marital stability that plans a horrific murder otherwise showing a sturdy ethical sensitivity. A loving if superficial wife turning out to be a ruthless entrepreneur. A sweet and caring, almost childish, young lady seduced by trivial material pulses. A cynical scientist, a fake publicist, and a bunch of hooligan workers. None of them is empathic. They are all in some way disappointing, nauseating, obnoxious.
Dealing with more domestic demons than Elio Petri’s soon to be conceived Trilogy of Neurosis, Giulio Questi’s satire delves into moral and intellectual human aberrations with the same anxiety and scepticism that are intrinsic to a certain disenchanted way to look at modernity, and therefore the future.
In Questi’s words, ‘Industrialization was a rising tide that overwhelmed everything, a hymn to the future, a frenetic packaging of products without distinction between inanimate and animate, that still alive screamed in terror and pain. The big farms were a symbol of this. Each chicken was a man, each hen a woman, each chick a child. Wealth was built on them. And the egg triumphed over everything, white, smooth, perfect, with the life closed inside. Sexual perversion remained the only possible way out.’