Pasolini

By: Amos Lassen

"Pasolini"
"A Man for All Seasons"
Amos Lassen
Abel Ferrara's movie about director Pier Paolo Pasolini's final day in 1975 is a film for those who enjoy art film. It is 'non-linear' and some of the adjectives used to describe include 'cubist' and 'kaleidoscopic'. The viewer must piece things together to create a moment in Pasolini's life and it might help to know something about the man before watching the film.
Pasolini was a poet, writer, film director, political figure and cultural philosopher. Some considered him controversial because of his leftist politics and the way he chose to shock audiences with his films. One of the things he is known for is to have said, "To scandalize is a right, to be scandalized is a pleasure".
Set not long after Pasolini made "Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom", his incredibly controversial anti-fascist take on one of the Marquis De Sade's novels (Salo stayed banned in the UK until 2000), when Pasolini is in Rome putting together his new film. We follow Pasolini through his day, mixed in with memories of his past, moments from the film he'll never get to make and parts of letters and other things he's been writing. There is no conventional plot. I understand that the film is based on what really happened in his life and that some of the dialogue was taken straight from his interviews and writings. We are to see Pasolini as an artist, although it struggles with him more as a human being. He deeply loved his mother and he was quite ambivalent about his sexuality, beyond the fact he loves him mother and is ambivalent about his sexuality. His feelings about carnality can be seen in his film. I saw the film as heading toward his death and the controversy of the murder that took his life. Here is death is presented as capricious and random (this ignores the insistence by some that he was assassinated by the Mafia, or by others who objected to his 'communist' politics).
Ferrera focuses on Pasolini as a victim of cruel and unthinking homophobia and his death is brutal, nasty and shocking. Here it is mixed with moments from the film he's planning and that he's promised will be about a more personal truth than his earlier work. Like Pasolini's films, this is distant and somewhat cold. In fact, it's sometimes a slightly distant film, but that's kind of fitting, as Pasolini's movies are sometimes rather cold.
The film hardly goes into the man. It was no secret that he way gay---he had been arrested early in his career so people knew even though he rarely spoke about it. He was a pivotal figure in the political foment of post-war Italy, where the extremes of the left wing and right wing fought with themselves and each other and where organized crime and political corruption were part of the culture. We only get a slight look at this. Pasolini's films combined themes of religion and sex and his own personal views on important topics to him. Willem Dafoe doesn't so much imitate or play Pasolini in the film, but he inhabits the actions and thoughts of him. Director Ferrara spoke to Pasolini's relatives and friends to hear the memories and thoughts of a man and in actuality, the film is more of a combination of the actual events that took place coupled with scenes from an unmade Pasolini film, a film that he was actually working on when he died. So we have Ferrara wearing the shoes of Pasolini and bringing to life scenes from the film that Pasolini never made along with the events from the last days of his life which included meetings to discuss his new film, in his home with his mom and assistant and various friends, and to finally, his pickup of a male rent boy who would kill him.
Ferrara uses the actual locations of the real life events and also uses Pasolini's personal objects and clothes in the film. This, coupled with Dafoe's performance, gives us a documentary style production that is very rich in its storytelling. Dafoe gives a wonderful performance inhabiting Pasolini's world, right down to the language (some of this film is in Italian, and not every part of it has subtitles), to the glasses that he wears, his clothing, to the way he carries himself. We see Dafoe act as Pasolini right up to his death when he has sex with the rent boy and ends up being badly beaten, and run over by his own car. It's a brutal death for a man who didn't deserve to die that way. His murder on a beach on the outskirts of Rome on November 2, 1972 is still an open case despite the conviction of the rent boy that he picked up that night.
The film seems content simply to watch Pier Paolo Pasolini (Willem Dafoe) at work in the final day of his life as the master filmmaker discusses ideas for his novel, "Petrolio", and sits down at a typewriter to develop another one of its chapters. He reviews post-production footage of "Salo" and gives notes to the editor. Ferrara stresses the reality of creation, of its ordinary activities that nonetheless give an artist a sense of fulfillment and Pasolini's connection to people, to friends and family, never ranting about his controversial material, but gently illustrating the moral base underneath his nihilistic art. There is no forecast of his horrible murder or of picking up a young prostitute and treating the boy to a nice meal before taking him to a beach for sex. For all the conspiracy theories that surround Pasolini's murder, the film sees it as senseless homophobia. I believe that the film is also a lament for what the world was lost because of Pasolini's death yet it is also a celebration of his legacy.