WILLEM DAFOE IN PASOLINI

Tragedy by the beach: Ferrara films the genius, politics, and tragedy of Pasolini

Legendary Italo-American indie rebel Abel Ferrara and his career, some think, slipped into in a black hole some years ago. His dubious end-of-the-world film 4:44 Last Day on Earth (NYFF 2011) might have stood as his only decent effort in a decade. His 2004 Go Go Tales (NYFF 2007, the same blasphemous Italian critic holds, is be remembered chiefly for featuring Asia Argento French-kissing a rottweiler. Welcome to New York, Ferrara's very recent straight-to-Internet reenactment of the DSK scandal by Gérard Depardieu, scarcely gets mentioned. Given all that, Ferrara's Pasolini is a surprisingly class act. It comes with high level government sponsorship from Italy, France, and Belgium. Its tech credts are quality, its look spare and formally elegant. It's both thought-provoking and touching. Its tragedy creeps up on you, through an uneven, more conceptual first half to a more conventional but still haunting conclusion. Ferrara avoids biopic conventions, but he provides the ritual depiction of the last days and death, and Pasolini's murder is an essential moment, brutal, sudden, premature, and perhaps inevitable, as well as long investigated, debated and puzzled over, a death that is more than usually part of the life.

"Prismatic portrait," the festival blurb calls this short "non-linear" film about Pier Paolo Pasolini's last days. That is one way of explaining the somewhat disjointed and puzzling jumble of early sequences, requireing intimate knowledge of the biography and history to decode. Particularly puzzling to non-initiates might be scenes of Pasolini's fictional double from a novel, the “Carlo” character (Roberto Zibetti). But this is also a film which settles down into a fairly powerful finale of the writer/poet/filmmaker's doomed, violent end and those who mourn it whose elegiac final moments, enhanced by a soaring rendition of Rossini's "Una voce poco fa" by Maria Callas in her prime, take one seamlessly from squalor to grandeur. (Pasolini had filmed Callas in his not wholly successful Media. This film does not mention his brilliantly innovative late triumphs, the storytelling trilogy of The Canturbury Tales, Decameron, and Thousand and One Nights, preferring to refer straight off with clips of his last cinematic work, the shocking (and horrifying) Salo. Willem Dafoe, speaking mostly English (in scenes where others speak Italian) is restrained and convincing, given that it's hard to play a genius and a cultural icon. With many references to Pasolni's unfinished novel Petrolio, we also get a (partly) dignified and touching appearance from Pasolini's friend and star, Ninetto Davoli, and a current actor he'd probably have liked to film, the ice-blue-eyed heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio. Davoli plays Epifanio, characgter in a dreamed-of film Pasolini never got to make. Scarmarcio plays the young Davoli. They appear in a visionary finale combining a gay and lesbian "Sodom" and a fruitless climb to Paradise.

Meanwhile, Pasolini, depicted by the equally craggy-faced and darkly spectacled Dafoe, lives with his mother (the extraordinary and legendary Adriana Asti), and gives interviews. Outside, Ferrara frames Rome with striking (if heavyhandedly repeated) images of sky and Fascist architectural monuments and heroic sculptures, while providing hints of lurking fascist and homophobic street toughs. Pasolini spent the last hours of his life with an angel-faced apprentice mechanic he picked up among "ragazzi di vita" on the street. He takes him to dinner (spaghetti and chicken) in a favorite trattoria where he is known and welcomed at all hours, then he drives him in his Alfa Veloce to the beach at Ostia, where he performs fellatio and then they walk to the beach for more sex and then the toughs come and beat the poet and beleaguered cultural hero to death, with the boy he picked up joining in. It has been debated whether this was a spontaneous act of brutish homophobia or a paid-for execution by right-wing elements made to look like that.

If fellatio and a brutal murder can be tasteful this film is tasteful, but there is much to question too, particularly the dubious sub-Caligula Sodom sequence with sex to the chant of “Cazzo! Figa! Vaffanculo!” and departures from accurate representation of Pasolini's actual biographical details. Italian viewers have difficulty accepting the shifts back and forth between English and Italian and the American actor in the key role. And not just Italians: Peter Debruge (who much admires the orgy scene) wrote in Variety that "The brilliance of stunt casting Willem Dafoe as the controversial Italian director backfires when he opens his mouth to speak." But open-minded Italian viewers can appreciate the Italo-American Ferrara's having the boldness to tread where an Italian could not even in representing Pasolini -- as well as his focusing much, as Federico Gironi noted in a recent review, not on Pasolini and the past but Pasolini as he would view the future, and us. (Pasolini opens in Italy 25 September 2014. It debuted at Venice, and was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival.)

Pasolini, 86 mins., will also be shown at Toronto, Deauville, San Sebastián, Busan, and London.

(For my full coverage of the 2014 NYFF see also FILMLEAF.)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.