Pasolini

Sometimes a director wants to pay hommage to a past legend. We have seen it many times with talented directors like Tarentino, De Palma and others. You tell a story and you insert scenes like the masters and you move on, please don't ruin the mystique of masters of illusion by doing boring A DAY IN THE LIFE OF.... When you try to shoot biographical episodes, you are doing a high wire act in high winds. You are most likely to fall flat on your face and seriously injure your reputation. This is the case here. PPP was a shock jock whot reveled in visual controversy and in his writings. He was a combo of Bunuel-Dali-Picasso-Zola. To show his last day was about as interesting as reading the one word Twas and closing the book on A christmas carol. Move on people! there is NO story here

Although beautifully shot and well acted, this movie is fairly disappointing and inconclusive. It doesn't really say much about Pasolini and the oniric scenes just fall flat.

Abel Ferrara's long-gestated biopic of Pier Paolo Pasolini has its congenital defect, by cast Willem Dafoe (albeit his striking physical resemblance) as the maestro, hence, the prominent anglophone dialog is rightly incongruous with its milieu and becomes more problematic because the rest Italian cast must follow suit, even for the venerable actress Adriana Asti, who plays Pasolini's senior mother, during a family and friend home-gathering, has to awkwardly keep the conversation going in her heavily accented English, that is a misstep to cut right through a naturally intimate occasion where could have spoken volumes of the internal discord. This language hitch is too big to ignore also because it is erratic, Dafoe manages to converse small talks in Italian (although the credit on IMBb listing that the voice is dubbed), but when he needs to express Pasolini's ideology, he switches to English, as he confesses during the interview with journalist Furio Colombo (Siciliano), paraphrasing here "it is better for me to write than speak about my thoughts", so Ferrara's indecision to stick to one solution chips away the film's potency.

The film begins just days before Pasolini's shocking demise, but Ferrara judiciously doesn't tap into the juicier conspiracy theories spawned from it henceforth, and Dafoe's performance is restrained most of the time, pensively buries his self-consciousness of the impending quietus, his Pasolini is benevolent, intelligent and impermeable. The film only fitfully weaves flashback into its slender narrative (an 84-minute length), the sexual experience in his youth and rambling, indeterminate thoughts, but one of the merits is that Ferrara pays his reverence to piece together Pasolini's unfinished film, envisioning an idiosyncratic "messiah-seeking" journey starring Pasolini's "great love of his life" Ninetto Davoli as Epifanio and Riccardo Scamarcio as Davoli himself answering their calling and witnessing an annual heterosexual copulation ceremony (in the name of procreation) between gays and lesbians (celebrated with pyrotechnics) en route until a cosmic ending commensurate with Pasolini's own fate.

The film is chromatically enveloped with a blue-tinted pall of a grubby Rome in the 70s, and when the brutal crunch finally descends on the night of November 2nd, 1975, Ferrara chooses a more pedestrian cause for the attack but injects his condemnation with one glimpse-or-you-will-miss-it shot where the homophobic perpetrators run over a badly beaten Pasolini when hurrying off the place in his vehicle, it could be the final blow extinguishing his last breath, whether it is intentional or accidental, either way, Ferrara hits home with the happening's incomprehensible cruelty.

Poignancy reaches its apex in Asti's heart-rending breakdown through Maria de Medeiros' Laura Betti, attendant with Callas' stentorian threnody. Ferrara's PASOLINI is a disciple's deferential and cerebral homage to a mentor, whom he has never met and whose myth has been perpetuating around us ever since the horrific tragedy.

I remember the reporting on the sordid killing of poet and director, Pier Paolo Pasolini but was stunned to learn it took place as long ago as 1975, just after the completion of Salo. The last day or so of Pasolini's life is told here in a fittingly realistic and dark way but with clips from that last (very difficult) film and newly shot sequences from the director's script for a newly proposed enterprise, once more mixing the magical the religious and downright dirty. Ferrara is, of course, as uncompromising man as his subject and this believable portrait is simply that rather than some flattering or ego boosting enterprise. Willem Dafoe's performance is quite amazing and the look he achieves quite uncanny, Having an Italian wife who adored Pasolini seems to have helped him with this but it is a truly astonishing performance within a very good film. Neither Ferrara nor Pasolini have produced work that is the easiest to enjoy but nor can either be ignored.

Part hero worship, part true-crime tragedy and completely of a piece with its creator's obsessions over the spiritual and the sordid. An unconventional approach to what should be a straightforward biopic, Pasolini's willingness to get lost within the artist's creative perspective while detailing his life creates a powerful and evocative look into the dark world of one of cinema's most controversial figures. It may be only one man's version of what many have speculated about... but its clear-eyed grittiness is also a tribute from a filmmaker for whom the night's temptations were ripe and its dangers legion. In depicting Pasolini's final hours, director Abel Ferrara emphasises the tranquil, serene environment in which his subject worked, the foundation of domesticity that anchored him, though ultimately could not shield him. Despite Ferrara's attempts to generate scandalous imagery of his own, he winds up with many sequences of touching beauty. The jumbling of languages offers a way forward, reaching towards a medium in which modes of communication become equivalent, offset by the marvellous central performance of one of cinema's greatest actors, Willem Dafoe. The idea of a search is a significant parallel between the two intertwined portions of the film, which seem to work towards opposing ends yet culminate in the conclusion of a common node: the art of Pier Paolo Pasolini is inseparable from his death.