"Do you miss the times when people used to insult you in the street?"
Abel Ferrara is no stranger to controversy – the director of Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant creating waves in his early days. Still, he’s not the first name you’d think of when it comes to dramatising the last day of the eponymous Italian writer-director-poet-philosopher-intellectual, murdered in 1975. That said, no one springs to mind.
The film settles into some sort of narrative in the run up to the discovery of Pasolini’s body on a beach, run over by his own car that was driven, allegedly, by a male prostitute he had brought there just days before his most provocative work – Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom – was released. But until then Ferrara jumps around a lot - a presentation that will delight the man himself. An early scene has Pasolini ask a friend if his ambitious novel – a mixture of plot, character, letters, essays, poems, and random thoughts – has clarity and this seems to be Ferrara’s tact too (although the audience isn’t asked anything of the sort) as Pasolini comprises of a cobbling together of scenes and scenarios that illustrate the director’s multiple talents.
Scenes don’t flow but exist independent of each other: there’s his last interview with journalist Furio Colombo (Francesco Sicliano) and his bleak outlook for Italy’s future; his last meal with his family; and a meeting his producers for Porno-Teo-Kolossal, his next film, one he will never get to make (but which Ferrara gladly shoots a scene or two for him). It’s a deliberately disjointed and fragmented venture. “Narrative art is dead,” he claims at one point, “And we are in mourning.” It’s really only the run up to his final hours that Pasolini comes to link scenes together into a recognisable sequence.
Along the way Ferrara dots the film with nods and winks to Pasolini’s work (Pasolini regular Davoli plays Epifanio, a character in the Pasolini film that was never made; Scamarico meanwhile plays Davoli) which will delight fans and go over the heads of those unacquainted with the director; then again if you’re unacquainted with Pasolini it’s unlikely you’ll be watching this.
But bar this sequence in the run up to his death, it’s hard to be involved with what unfolds on screen. We’re kept at a distance and told to admire. A deep and dark film with an understated performance from Defoe, but it just doesn’t click together.