One of the most assured debuts in all of cinema, Bertolucci was only twenty-one when he made "The Grim Reaper" from a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It's definitely a young man's film, a police procedural in which the police remain off-screen. A prostitute has been murdered and we see the events leading up to her death through the eyes of the various suspects, all of whom have reason to lie, but what interests Bertolucci and Pasolini isn't so much the crime itself but the lives of these young men and the conditions in which they live.
Using a mix of professional and non-professional actors Bertolucci aims for a new kind of realism but one that is closer to early Rosselleni than the more polished films Fellini was turning out at the time. The Grim Reaper of the title isn't so much the one that robs the prostitute of her life as the one who steals away the will to live from everyone else. Each 'chapter' is filmed in a distinctive style that signalled Bertolucci as a director of considerable originality and made us aware a new wunderkind had arrived.
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