Abel Ferrara's 2014 film 'Pasolini' is flat as a pancake. The script is an idea cooked up by Ferrar himself and writer Maurizio Baucci. Poor Wilem Dafoe, an excellent actor with a wide range, has the thankless role of Pasolini, a flat, cardboard character.
Ferara's trademark is provocation: in 'Pasolini' his use of sex, for whicch Pasolini used, like Moravia as an assault on the bourgoisie, the elite, government and the church, is an exercise in werisome boredom, and seems lacking in the political punch in Pasolini's films--be they the romp in 'Arabian Nights', 'Decameron' or 'Canerbury Tales'.
What does come across is Defoe as a Pasolini in his last days on earth. Ferrar engages in metaphysical double talk, and the political side of the writer, film maker and engaged militant is downplayed like a pencil ground down to a stub.
'Salo oe a 100 Days of Sodom' beca,e a cause celebre for its content as an attack on the staate and the church and its supporters, at a time of extreme political angst. In the 1970s, the Red Brigades engaged in assassinations, roberries, the murder of Aldo Moro, a scoundral time of when the left and the general feeling sensed the rebirth of fascism, which had to be stopped. 'Salo' is a bold reference to the 10 days of Mussolini's Republic before he was captured by the partisans and hanged along with his mistress, thereby ending the long reign of fascism in Italy.
Ferrara engages in a cerberal and metaphysical rendering of Pasolini. And yet he is true to Pasolini as a sexual predator of young, working class youth, in a way, albeiit unexpressed, is a very upper class, famous writer who exploits the lower classes for his pleasure. (In a way a trophe one finds in Tennesse Williams' 'Suddenly Last Summer'0.
And Pasolini is horribly beaten and murdered by the young men he exploited sexually, who at heart are homophobic, resent being used as a sexual object, and what's more exhibit fascist behavior.
Although not mentioned: Pasolini's 'Medea' with Maria Callas as Medea; the opening scenes of this film are memorable for the great actress Callas was, declaiming the opening lines in classicla Greek of Euripides play. That lacuna is made up by the voice of Callas singing a well-known aria from 'Barber of Sevile'. Ferara use of music offers no criticism to more a plodding narrative along. The censors may have held the 2014 film back owing to prudish standards, but 'Pasolini' is hardly aemorable film. And yet, 2019 is the half-century anniversary of Stonewall, so the film may get an audience that may be disappointed.
