MIFF NOTES: Pasolini (2015, Dir. Abel Ferrara)

When Pier Paolo Pasolini departed this life on November 2, 1975, he left us with not only one of the most overtly politicised and enigmatically beautiful bodies of artistic and intellectual expression but also with an enduring mystery. His murder on the beach at Ostia has been turned over many times. His murderer framed and reframed. The fatalistic artistic motives of the director himself have even been bandied about. Sex, death and immortality forever stamped on Pasolini's legacy.

There is one hell of a movie in the director's demise.

Abel Ferrara's promised much. Prior to the premiere of his Pasolini at Venice last year he promoted his vision, saying, "I know who killed Pasolini". If he does, his film does little to interrogate the events, or even to depict them with any vigour. Instead, Ferrara takes the public record facts and recreates them. Pasolini is beaten to death by the young men he frequently picked up for sex. They kill him. They run him over with his own car. They disappear into the night.

But if Pasolini is unsatisfying in its examination of the director's death, it is more rewarding in its encapsulation of his deeply intellectual being. Ferrara gives the first two thirds of his film over to two of Pasolini's unfinished works: a novel, 'Petrolio', and a film, 'Porno-Teo-Kolossal'. The first offers gives Ferrara the chance to explore Pasolini's own interpretation of the life that would bring about his own end, the second the opportunity to recreate the director's stark cinematic style with Pasolini's one-time muse, Ninetto Davoli, in front of the camera once more - both as an actor himself, and with Riccardo Scamarcio recreating his past with Pasolini.

The mix gives Ferrara ample space to explore Pasolini's fierce intellectualism and the political pronouncements that made him so reviled amongst the Italian elite. With Willem Dafoe delivering a scorching lead performance and Pasolini's own words much of the screenplay, Pasolini is never less than evocative but, without offering up any substantial new insight, the exercise presents like an echo chamber of ideas, images and music. A place to wallow in the prescience of Pasolini's vision.

An alluringly morbid experience.

★★★

Trailer:

Pasolini screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2015.