Abel Ferrara (2014)
Pier Paolo Pasolini was beaten up then run over by his own car, on a beach at Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome, in November 1975. He was fifty-three years old. While the cause of death was clear, the motive for the murder remains, even now, somewhat murky. Pasolini was a notoriously idiosyncratic Marxist. He also regularly paid for sex with rent boys and it seems to have been assumed from the outset of the investigation into his killing that a rent boy was responsible. Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old male prostitute, confessed to the murder and served nine years in prison but, in 2005, retracted his confession. BBC news reported at the time that Pelosi claimed his confession had been made under threat of violence to his family and that ‘three unnamed men beat Pasolini to death …, shouting abuse and insults such as “dirty communist”’. In the light of Pelosi’s statement, the Rome police reopened inquiries into the murder but, according to Wikipedia, ‘the judges charged with investigating it determined the new elements insufficient for them to continue the inquiry’. In Abel Ferrara’s new film about the final day (or two) of Pasolini’s life, there are several young men, including Pelosi, involved in the fatal assault but they shout homophobic rather than political abuse at their victim. Ferrara’s purpose in making Pasolini is unclear from the end product but it doesn’t appear to have been to perpetuate the mystery of the murder.
It’s hard, in fact, to see from the film why Ferrara chose to make a drama at all. He and the screenwriter Maurizio Braucci (whose other writing credits include the Matteo Garrone movies Gomorrah and Reality) seem not to have a clue as to how to bring the material to dramatic life. As Pasolini, Willem Dafoe reads his lines thoughtfully and carefully, as if they were the imperishable insights of a great thinker, but he might as well be doing the voice in a documentary: Pasolini was politically and philosophically engaged and creatively versatile to an extraordinary degree but these qualities don’t describe his personality. We watch and listen to him as he holds court in his Rome apartment, in the company of his mother Susanna (Adriana Asti), who lives with her son, his secretary-cum-housekeeper Graziella (Giada Colagrande), the actress Laura Betti (Maria De Medeiros) and Pasolini’s friend and fellow polymath Nico Naldini (Valerio Mastandrea). Pronouncing X a great novel, Y a great poet and so on, without explaining why he thinks them great, Dafoe’s Pasolini seems at first no more than fatuously self-important. What he says in an interview with a journalist later in the day at least expresses some of Pasolini’s political views in more detail. Willem Dafoe’s high cheekbones in combination with the shades he wears for much of the film give him an intriguing appearance but there’s not much he can do with the role as written – although he does, thanks to his natural actor’s appetite for finding a character, suggest something eating at Pasolini, particularly when he picks up Pelosi (Damiano Tamilia, who has an appropriate brutal indolence). Adriana Asti, who gives Susanna Pasolini an urgently fearful quality, and Valerio Mastandrea both look ready to deliver something – but Mastandrea is given nothing to do and Asti’s big moment comes when Susanna reacts to the news of her beloved son’s death: although she’s powerful, it’s irritating that, at this point, Ferrara and Braucci revert abruptly to familiar biopic territory.
Pasolini begins with a shorter interview between the protagonist and another journalist (conducted in French, although it appears to have taken place in Stockholm, from where Pasolini returned on the eve of his death). This interview is intercut with footage from Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which Pasolini was in the process of finalising at the time. As Abel Ferrara proceeds, he weaves pieces of other dramatised material into his mostly inert narrative of Pasolini’s last hours. Willem Dafoe’s voiceover explains that Pasolini is sending the manuscript of a novel to one friend and the script for a film to another. Until I read (after seeing Pasolini) Robbie Collin’s laudatory review in the Daily Telegraph, however, it wasn’t clear to me that ‘a night-time assignation on a heath [or] … a high-society audience held rapt by an anecdote about an air disaster’ were ‘snatches of Pasolini’s novel’. There are also scenes involving two actors, the middle-aged, comical-looking Epifanio and the younger Ninetto Davioli, playing men who follow a shooting star from Rome to Sodom and find that life there is largely homosexual, except when members of the gay and lesbian communities have intercourse once a year for the ‘Festival of Fertility’ – an amusing idea that’s rather dull (Salo-lite) when realised by Ferrara on screen. The real Ninetto Davioli appeared in Pasolini films and was one of his lovers – now in his mid-sixties, Davioli plays Epifanio. (His younger self is played by Riccardo Scamarcio.) It struck me early on that Ferrara might be assuming a significant prior knowledge of Pasolini on the part of the audience: it turns out that he relies on such knowledge not only in order for the viewer to make full sense of Pasolini but also – through things like the casting of Davioli (and, to a lesser extent, that of Adriana Asti, who appeared in Accattone) – to give the film emotional resonance.
In other respects, the connections between sequences that Ferrara looks to achieve are not so much chimes as clangs. The ‘night-time assignation’ describes sex between a group of young men and a lone ‘customer’ – a somewhat older man, who enjoys enraptured cock-sucking. I’m not sure if the younger men are the same actors who play Pasolini’s killers but, in any case, the juxtaposition of this sequence with the eventual murder has the effect of an antique, playing-with-fire warning about the kind of sex life Pasolini led. In a restaurant, shortly before he goes out cruising, Pasolini reads to Davioli (ie as played by Scamarcio) the concluding lines of his ‘Epifanio’ script. If Ferrara had left it to the audience to bring these lines to mind when Pasolini dies, the recollection might have been poignant. Instead, he puts on screen the final scene of ‘Epifanio’ and it’s merely boring to listen to the actors working through the lines you’ve already heard. (You don’t, however, know what you’ve heard in some other parts of the film: the subtitling of the non-English dialogue was intermittent, for reasons that escape me.) Pasolini was screened at the London Film Festival as part of the ‘Dare’ section – defined as ‘in-your-face, up-front and arresting: films that take you out of your comfort zone’. On the way out of NFT1, I heard a man saying to his companion, ‘I dropped off, to be honest …’
13 October 2014
