Abel Ferrara's last film, Welcome to New York, was an ebullient sketch of the downfall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a rascal who couldn't keep it in his pants. An even murkier production, Pasolini laments the destruction of a gifted man by his sexuality too.
The gay film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered on a beach near Rome in 1975. A 17-year-old hustler confessed and was convicted of the killing but may not have acted alone: conspiracy theories abound.
Pasolini remains a great figure in Italy as a writer and public intellectual as well as a film-maker. In Britain, if he is esteemed at all, it’s for his early work, such as The Gospel According to St Matthew (Silver Lion in Venice in 1964), rather than the sadistic Salo, or 120 Days Of Sodom.
Ferrara’s biopic suffers from the universal problem of the genre: our foreknowledge of the story. We pick up Pasolini on the penultimate day of his life, returning from a conference, fellating a series of contemptuous boys near the Colosseum. At home, in his elegant apartment, tended by his doting mama, he shows another face. Willem Dafoe looks remarkably like the pictures of Pasolini, and projects contained intelligence as plausibly here as in Tom & Viv.
An interviewer records Pasolini’s aperçus: he spouts claptrap about the consumer society being worse than fascism, for which he is still revered by some on the continent. Meeting friends in a restaurant, he explains his next film, Porno Teo-Kolossal, which Ferrara has belatedly made for us as an inset. A portly gent with white hair and a bow tie spectates benevolently at an orgy where gay men and women screw once a year amid wild chanting.
He picks up a rent-boy. In his sporty Alfa, they go to the beach for sex but are disturbed by a homophobic gang who beat Pasolini savagely.
The film is shadowy and elegiac but will do nothing to persuade sceptics of Pasolini’s genius. Ferrara evidently feels an affinity for him not so much as a victim of complex cultural forces as of shameful sexual repression.
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