Nerolio

Fictional portrait from director Aurelio Grimaldi about the sexual contradictions of the film-maker, poet and political pamphleteer Pier Paulo Passolini.

Nerolio is a feature in three episodes about Pier Paolo Pasolini. In the first part, ‘the poet’ is on his way Syracuse, where he moves into a luxury hotel before going out to admire the boys. When night falls, he pays them for sex. In a lyrical voice-over, he praises the revitalising qualities of youth. The second, longest and funniest part is about the visit of an apparently idolatrous student to Pasolini’s house. In the third part, the poet picks up a boy who kills him after an obscure quarrel.In Italy, Pasolini has become an unassailable icon, despite the fact that he was often condemned as a heretic and is still a topic of conversation. In his film, Grimaldi stresses that in the artist’s life ‘night and homosexuality are not of secondary importance’. Every night, either in Rome or filming on location, Pasolini left his intellectual friends to go in search of sex with boys. ‘You want to believe it was only for the sex and not for the love, warmth and life?’ the film Pasolini asks the student. ‘Of course we don’t want to believe that,’ is Grimaldi’s reply. His homage shot in stunning black & white offers room for a variety of interpretations of the man Pasolini, without turning him into a saint. A very different film from the much more fawning Pasolini, un delitto Italiano, that was screened at Rotterdam last year. –Rotterdam