Kritiken

Pasolini certainly doesn’t resemble any other film by Abel Ferrara, but then again, it doesn’t resemble anything that the Italian director made. Written by Mauricio Braucci and based on an idea by Ferrara and Nicola Tranquillino, it’s a sort of free-wheeling assemblage of ideas about Pasolini.

A love letter from one iconoclastic Italian Catholic artist to another, Abel Ferrara's "Pasolini" stays far from the cliches of the Hollywood biopic, embracing a fragmented, intense, impressionistic approach.

stylistically, it's almost as if Ferrara has moved from being the great-grandson of F.W. Murnau to being the grandson of Vincente Minnelli—although one could argue, more precisely, that it isn't really an auteur film at all. Yet as a portrait of the great and uncontainable Pier Paolo Pasolini, filtered through the last day of his life—a day focused on new creative work as well as various other activities, at home and on the street—it carries an undeniable conviction and emotional authenticity.

[In some] moments, including an unsparing death scene that's all the more fascinating and horrifying because it's so sapped of dignity or grace, Pasolini is impossible to dismiss. When its defining characteristics so often clash with and nullify each other, it feels no less difficult to love.

The special, artistic payoff of this reconstruction, however, is also unmistakable. Alongside all those moments where Pasolini appears to be forecasting his own tragic death, there are just as many scenes that are entirely undramatic and touching in their homeliness: Pasolini interacting with his beloved mother Susanna (Adriana Asti, former actor for Pasolini and Bertolucci) and his friends; or on a makeshift soccer field, energetically kicking the ball around with a bunch of young guys.

Perhaps the first of this biopic's many beautiful shocks is that it has no appetite for scandal. The second is that it isn't actually a biopic at all, but a patchwork of planes and angles from the final day of the director's life. You come in expecting portraiture, but Ferrara gives you Cubist still life.

Making its world premiere a few months after Ferrara's Welcome to New York in Cannes, this exquisitely tuned portrait looks at the pioneering gay Marxist filmmaker-poet-theorist through his last days on Earth in November 1975, all interspersed with fanciful/macabre scenes from his unmade film Porno-Teo-Kolossal.

All [the films at NYFF] were overshadowed by the achievement of Abel Ferrara's Pasolini. Having suffered the fate of many an aesthetically maverick American director – neglect in his own country mirrored by acclaim in France – 2014 may well come to be seen as a key year in Ferrara's enduring career.

Save a few scenes depicting Pasolini's domestic life—which I found spellbinding—this film lacked the moment-to-moment ‘behavioral inventiveness' and surprise that I prize so much in Ferrara. When Pasolini's death arrives, it is rendered conventionally, without a single unpredictable note in any of its detail. Still, it's not a movie I dislike, even if it feels a world away from his great run of the 1990s.

To adopt Pasolini and his creations into a Ferrara film is only fitting. In one sense, at least, Ferrara has literally adopted Pasolini's style: Dafoe is wearing the dead man's clothes... Ferrara obviously could care less about the timing, or about opening up his Pasolini to an audience who knows little or nothing about the subject. This is to be applauded, for Ferrara's infidelity is the sincerest form of homage.

Ferrara does show him as world-weary and depressive, but there's no hint that his work had been in decline for several years, or that his last film, "Salo," was evidently the work of a disturbed guy losing the battle with his demons. Pasolini was a complex and endlessly controversial man. But "Pasolini" steers clear of generating controversy itself. It gives us the saintly, sanitized version. I'm sure a certain percentage of Pasolini's acolytes will like it; I rather doubt Pasolini would.

Ferrara gives us not so much Pasolini the person but Pasolini the creator, weaving scenes from an unmade film and an unfinished novel into his portrait. In so doing, he walks a fine line: His re-creations don't attempt to ape Pasolini's style — Ferrara is a much different filmmaker — but they do try to evoke it in subtle and interesting ways.