AllMovie

Though it has the trappings of a mystery, Bernardo Bertolucci's debut feature, based on a story by his one-time neighbor Pier Paolo Pasolini, is really a probe of the reliability of narrative. Told in a series of interconnected flashbacks by "persons of interest" in the murder of a prostitute, the crime is easily resolved and the identity of the murder is almost irrelevant, because Bertolucci is much more interested in exploring how each suspect frames his own alibi. Intercut among the various narratives are shots of the victim beginning her day by rising from her bed and staring out onto the morning rain, oblivious to her fate. For a 21-year-old filmmaker, this is a remarkably pessimistic work; the film's opening image, of a sheaf of paper tossed from a car on highway overpass and eventually floating down to the corpse of the prostitute on the grass, to the murderer's cries as he's arrested -- "She was only a whore!" -- we get a sense that life, at least in some quarters of society, is easily disposable.