Il vangelo secondo Matteo
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964)
Awarded prizes both at the Venice Film Festival and by the Vatican, this is one of the most widely admired of Biblical films. Made by a man famous for being atheist, Marxist and gay, it carries a dedication to the recently deceased Pope John XXIII. Most of the performers are non-professionals: Christ is played by the nineteen-year-old Enrique Irazoqui (who, after a couple more movies, pursued a successful academic career), the older Mary by Pasolini’s mother Susanna. The look of most of the people in the film is that of mid-twentieth century Italians rather than Palestinians of two thousand years ago. This is more noticeable, of course, with the men and their reasonably short haircuts (although Jesus’s looks a bit styled), than with the covered-up women. Pasolini mostly uses the Matthean text and religious music from a variety of traditions, including Bach (Mass in B Minor as well as the St Matthew Passion), spiritual (“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”) and the Missa Luba: the culturally eclectic soundtrack is a persistent and an effective reminder of the spread of the Christian story across the world. The physical casting is in many cases remarkable: Irazoqui himself; Mary, both as a pregnant teenager (Margherita Caruso) and as a grieving mother; Peter (Settimio Di Porto, who has the look of a working man and a saint); Caiaphas (Juan Rodolfo Wilcock – a whited sepulchre indeed); numerous faces in the crowd. The uncertainty and self-consciousness of some of the children in front of a camera work perfectly: when they join in the Hosanna-ing as Christ enters Jerusalem, the eagerness of the kids in the cast to get in on the act – without necessarily understanding what it’s all about — chimes with what you feel the original children in Palestine may have experienced. Pasolini and his cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli shot the film in Southern Italy and the barren landscapes are – to my inexpert eye anyway – highly convincing.
I had problems, though, with The Gospel According to Matthew. The documentary fluency of the camerawork and the realness of the physical settings sit awkwardly with the lack of naturalism in the exchanges between characters: it’s as if Pasolini were filming a local community putting on a religious play with a set theatrical form. There’s virtually no connection between Jesus and any of the disciples and the miracles are somehow perfunctory. I wasn’t expecting dazzling special effects but the film conveys no sense of what Christ’s healing of a leper or a cripple or feeding the five thousand meant to – even how it was received by – anyone involved. The surprising exception is the walking on water, which seems to pose the greatest challenge in terms of avoiding supernatural bathos but which is mysteriously affecting. The main problem in the film is Jesus himself. When he gets an opponent tied up in verbal knots or chides Peter in the ‘Suffer the little children’ sequence or ticks off Judas for criticising the use of expensive spikenard to anoint the Saviour’s feet, Jesus is a pain. When he asks, ‘Who is my mother?’ I couldn’t help thinking of Graham Whittaker’s description of the vicar’s visit in Alan Bennett’s A Chip in the Sugar:
‘Breezes in, anorak and running shoes, and he says, ‘I always look forward to coming to this house, Mrs Whittaker. … Do you know why? It’s because you two remind me of Jesus and his mother’. Well, I’ve always thought Jesus was a bit off-hand with his mother, and on one occasion I remember he was quite snotty with her, but I didn’t say anything …’
Enrique Irazoqui seems like a student who’s suddenly discovered that he knows the lot – it was rather satisfying to find in the programme note that I read afterwards that a student is exactly what he was at the time. The son of an Italian mother and a Spanish (Catalan) father, Irazoqui, according to Hannah McGill’s piece in Sight & Sound, was studying economics in Italy and ‘reluctantly appeared in the film in exchange for Pasolini’s patronage of his anti-fascist group’. At one stage of The Gospel According to Matthew, Pasolini supplies a montage of Christ’s sermons and parables. The relentlessness of his message may well be the point but the lack of variety in the voice imparting it makes you want it to stop. Pasolini has been quoted as saying about this film that ‘images could never reach the poetic heights of the text’. I was often moved by the words – or, to be precise, by the subtitles – but I knew that I was relying on what the words meant because of their enduring familiarity, and sometimes their meaning, rather than responding to how they were spoken. This wasn’t Enrique Irazoqui’s fault: the voice of Christ is supplied by Enrico Maria Salerno. (It’s one of the cherishable ironies of 1960s cinema history that Salerno also supplied the Italian voice of Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns.)
In the closing stages – because what happens in Jerusalem, in Gethsemane, on the Way of the Cross and at Calvary is profoundly and intrinsically dramatic – The Gospel According to Matthew sparks to life. There’s a startling moment when Judas (Otello Sestili) grins, for the first time, when he strikes the deal with the high priests: his face really lights up. Pasolini cleverly omits the cock crow you keep expecting during Peter’s denial of Christ. Judas’s suicide is well staged and played. You get the shocking fickleness of the crowd, and a sense of Jesus’s terrible humiliation – you may also find yourself troubled by the realisation that this human cruelty is at the heart of the religion which has defined your own culture and existence. After the crucifixion, the resurrection – it has to be said – is a bit of an anti-climax. I was expecting Mary Magdalene to meet the gardener. Instead, a group of important characters see the stone at the entrance to the tomb rolled away. This and the girl angel who then announces that Christ is risen have a whiff of Hollywood – quite a strong whiff because, in the context of the film as a whole, it’s so distinctive. This may the only point at which Pasolini’s movie intersects with George Stevens’ notorious The Greatest Story Ever Told, released in the US at almost exactly the same time.
6 March 2013
