Abel Ferrara | Pasolini / 2014

body and mind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maurizio Braucci (screenplay, based on a story by Abel Ferrara and Nicola Tranquillino), Abel Ferrara (director) Pasolini / 2014

 

Unlike most biopics, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini begins neither with a cramming in of information of the central subject’s past life nor in a series of essential current or final events. Ferrara’s work, although touching on current events in Pasolini’s life such as his recent completion of the controversial film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom—which one of his associates suggest they should premiere in Milan because there they have the most chance of fighting the inevitable censorship—primarily focuses on seemingly pedestrian events. The filmmaker / poet / fiction writer / philosopher / political commentator (brilliantly performed by Willem Dafoe), having just returned from a trip to Sweden, spends his time with his mother Susanna (Adriana Asti) and his cousin Graziella (Giada Colagrande), who lives with his mother and him and serves almost as his secretary.

     Pasolini reads the newspapers, prepares and gives a lecture, submits to the questions of a journalist, and types away on manuscripts on his Olivetti typewriter. Although he drops the names of numerous celebrities (Miklós) Jancsó, Eduardo (De Filippo), (Alberto) Moravia, and his beloved gay poet friend (Sandro) Penna, Ferrara does not fill up the screen with the numerous visitations of a filmmaker such as Federico Fellini did in his 8 ½—which might almost be described as an auto-bio pic. The retiring Pasolini is visited by his gregarious friend Laura Betti (Maria de Medeiros) and his cousin Nico Naldini (Valerio Mastandrea), but he meets up mostly with the headlines which read as if Italy were in a war zone, describing major figures being gunned down on the street that parallel the writer’s own observations of the political, social, and cultural frustrations of its citizens, and his particular damnation of the government’ attempt to control and instill fear through everything it touches, particularly through the country’s educational system. Foretelling the events which will close out Ferrara’s cinematic framing of events within the last 24-hours of Pasolini’s life, the artist pontificates: “You do not even know who, in this very moment, is thinking about killing you.”

      Basically, however, one might never imagine that this film will end where we know it does, nor, for that matter, might we imagine it is a film by the often sensationalist-minded Ferrara. It is only when after dinner with his mother he drives his Alfa Romeo by a local gay pick-up spot on his way to another dinner with his beloved Ninetto Davoli, former love (Riccardo Scamarcio), his wife, and their baby, that we begin to sense something far more sinister afoot. It is not because of his scouring the streets and bars for young boys that startles us; but this time Pasolini had long made it clear through his writings and films that he had long sought out street boys, even meeting up them at midnight in the nightmarish bowels of the Flavian Amphitheater, better known as the Colosseum (my friend, Paul Vangelisti, once mentioned that in trying to interview Pasolini, the artist suggested they meet at midnight outside the Colosseum); but the fact that the now highly beloved and also much hated 53-year-old, as handsome as his sunken cheeks, deep-set eyes, and slightly haggard appearance still allowed him to be—all of which Dafoe unconsciously mimics—had not only just completed his most controversial work, one that even at the Washington, D. C. theater in which I saw it, viewers fled the auditorium as the film progressed, but that he was already imagining and casting from a new film, Porno-Teo-Kolossal, in which he wants Ninetto to star as Epifanio.

       It is, in fact, the description of that film and Ferrara’s creation of the never-produced movie that truly takes us into other dimensions in this work. Pasolini’s own imagined art takes over the mundanity of his day as he recounts the plot of the film he plans to make.

 

      Ferrara, taking over visually creates a rather absurd world wherein two not very wise men—the real actor Ninetto Davoli performing as Eduardo De Filippo, who was to have been Pasolini’s, Epifanio, and Scarmarcio (performing as Davoli)—arrive at the holy city, having spotted the heavenly star, by train. Immediately recognized as gay tourists, the local officials (also evidently gay) send these men to a special part of the city wherein their meet up with a street person who takes them to a special one-night-of-the-year party, in which all the lesbians join up with the gay men to procreate the human race.

       In an orgiastic event, select lesbians and gay men are paired up for open sexual encounters, cheered on by their sexual peers, fireworks sent off for each ejaculation. The work, based evidently on part of Pasolini’s fiction Petrolio and his screenplay for Porno-To-Kolossal to two pilgrims watch in wonderment, but soon see the Holy star moving out of skies as the fireworks go off.

       Nunzio, revealing that he is actually an angel—the role the much younger Davoli actually played in Pasolini’s Teorema (1968)—Epifanio joins his friend to fly to the heavens in search of paradise. They walk and walk and walk, but never get to paradise. Epifanio says “Where’s paradise, and Nunzio says, “It’s over there.” They walk and walk and walk and walk, but they never get to the place. As Pasolini tells the ending, “They’re so tired, they have to stop. Paradise doesn’t exist. Epifanio’s takes a piss, and then he turns back and looks at planet Earth. Sounds are coming from the faintly far away, music, voices, pop songs, advertising, revolutionary songs. He looks back at Earth. And then he says, ‘In the end, I’m happy that I followed that star because it gave me the opportunity to know better the planet I love so much.’ And then he turns to Nunzio and says, ‘What next?’ And Nunzio says, ‘The end doesn’t exist, so we just wait. Something will happen.’”

      One cannot imagine a more engaging fable to be at the heart of Pasolini’s last day, whether or not it is simply Ferrara’s fiction. Pasolini’s art is the heart of this work, with all of its carnality and spirituality interfused just as it was in the man himself. As The New York Times critic A.O. Scott quoted in his review of this film from a late Pasolini poem, there was always in the great artist an “endless capacity for obedience” along with his “endless capacity for rebellion.” Scott summarizes: “Ferrara organizes his film around that contrast, exploring how conservative and radical impulses can coexist within a single personality.”

     As critic Dave White, writing in The Wrap observes, in the most understated comment possible, “And then, late at night, he [Pasolini] takes the wrong young man to the beach for sex.”

     After leaving Davoli, the man, now perhaps past his prime in the art of making love to young Italian boys, always prickly about how they are perceived in relation to their macho images of themselves, picks up 17-year-old Pino Pelosi, feeding him at late-night café in Ostia, and attempts to turn him into a lover at the beach.

      Despite Ferrara and writer Braucci’s pre-film boasts about knowing why Pasolini was killed and the hint that the film might contain multiple tellings of the writer’s death, the final scenes as strangely as pedestrian as the earlier part of the working-poet’s day. White puts it succinctly:

 

“Ferrara treats the murder matter-of-factly, as a tragic act of homophobic violence that is neither inevitable nor the summation of the victim’s life.”

     As the two begin to embrace, a group of homophobic young men run to attack, beating and   kicking the older man, and finally crushing his skull before the young Pino, perhaps out of simple self-protection or a sudden eruption of his own buried homophobic feelings, gets into the car and drives it over Pasolini’s body.

     White perceives the detailed attention of the incident as a failure: “It’s a gay-bashing, conducted by a group of men on a beach; whether or not it was, as some believe, a politically motivated assassination, or simply the fallout of a cultural politic that works to dehumanize all queer people, the camera sees fit to linger. It sticks around for the beating, the crushing of the skull, and then for the body being run over by a car. It’s almost as fetishistic as the death Dafoe endured in The Last Temptation of Christ, and it serves to upstage everything that comes before it.”

     That is not true, however, since what it really permits is a final coda representing perhaps the last remnants of Pasolini’s mind which allow the film to end with his art, Ferrar playing out visually the very last scenes of Pasolini’s imagined film as the spirit of the artist rises to the heavens to simply wait, very much like Samuel Beckett’s characters in Waiting for Godot, a fascinating link that one observes in the artist so often described as a neorealist, particularly given his own dialogic and abstract fabulist filmmaking evidenced in works such as The Hawks and the Sparrows, Teorema, and Pigsty, as well as his works based on The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights. It’s clear that had Porno-To-Kolossal been made, it would have been in this tradition of the artist’s work.

     Corporeality is almost always transmogrified in Pasolini’s works into the spiritual.

 

Los Angeles, December 7, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).