The scandal is purely formal. Contrary to appearances, this film is not an anticlerical satire. It can even be called a film adaptation of the book Spiritual Exercises by St. Ignatius Loyola. Don Gaetano (Mastroianni), who directs the “spiritual exercises” of a disgusting bunch of politicians and financiers, does not depart from the order prescribed by the saints in any way, recites the precepts from his book and conducts the actual rites of the Catholic Church. And that he is a “very bad priest”, a cunning and unworthy priest – he himself says at the beginning of the film. The somewhat ironic, fantastic interiors of the bunker where all this happens are no more anticlerical satire than the religious fashion show in Fellini's "Rome." The farce effect is created rather by the discrepancy between the strict sermons and the harsh rites of Don Gaetano, and by the tinkering of the sin-ridden and billions of demagogues and bureaucrats who simply fail to respond properly to church reality. It is they who will profane everything, down to the simplest of procedures: confession (Mariangela Melato as the wife of the President). Yes, at the head of this sodom shelms and scoundrels is a certain President: Gian Maria Volonte plays in an unusual caricature of a fiery prude and hypocrite.
Italian cinema, which received a powerful impulse of neorealism, and then that great creativity of Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci, which outgrown neorealistic limits in the 60-70s, at the same time broke into several genre trends. One of them is exploitation of various kinds (remember Deodato) and more artistic gallos and horrors of Argento and Fulci, the other is spaghetti westerns, the third is the acute social cinema of Damiano Damiani, for example, in which Volonte played the tragic “little man” in “I am afraid”: a serious acute social film dedicated to politics, mafia, public ulcers. But from this socially concerned cinema branched the postmodern grotesque of such directors as Lina Wertmüller and Elio Petri. Not to mention Marco Ferreri, his tediously vulgar tragicomedy in just one sample, The Big Grass, approached the absurd gaiety of the two previously mentioned. By the way, Wertmüller and Petrie willingly starred Mariangelo Melato, the actress, it seems, went on a personal crusade against the bourgeoisie. It is all necessary to imagine that it is correct to evaluate the “ratio” or “raison d’etre” of a film like Todo Modo.
If Wertmüller raped melodrama, Petrie was obsessed with a detective, the classic plot of Ten Negroes. Don Gaetano is quite similar to Judge Agatha Christie, who kills unpunished murderers. The only attack against the style and meaning of the "Spiritual Exercises" is not made by him, but by the weeping Tartuf-President. This character Volonte begins to add from the names of firms belonging to his close associates, who perish one by one, the phrase Todo modo para buscar la voluntad divino - "Any means to discover the will of the Lord." According to the President, murder is a sign. For the ultimate purpose of Loyola’s Exercises was to question the will of the Lord, which was to be revealed in the signs. And this will seems to be Petry’s in what the Vonnegut preacher from The Cat’s Cradle said to the remnants of dying humanity: “God seems to want us all to die.”
The film is quite consistent and logical, as we found out. Don Gaetano, to the question of his vis-à-vis the President about the will of God, responds quite piously with the definition of the apophase – the ascent to the concept of God by the gradual elimination of any concept – belonging to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the greatest authorities of Christian mysticism. It is important to emphasize that it is in the clash of religion with the bourgeois elite, unable to understand it and can only distort it, in the clash of Christianity and Agatho-Christianity in half with hard anti-bourgeois satire that the main comic effect of Todo Modo is concluded, provided by the clash of poetics, styles, genres that seemed incompatible. And an analogue of this ugliness should be sought not in Buñuel or Ferreri, but in the parables of Pasolini “The Pig” and “Theorem”.
9 out of 10