Critics reviews

La ricotta is an exuberant film, part in color and part in black-and-white and mixing comedy and tragedy in an unnerving way. It is also quite savage in its attacks on various targets, notably the Italian film industry, and arguably disrespectful to say the least toward Catholic tradition if not Christianity itself.

La ricotta seems to me to be above all a film about poverty, and the inability for this bourgeois class to understand it, except as the object of ridicule (the over-feeding scene of Stracci is accompanied by their laughter and cruel, brutalized faces).

Mixing the sacred and the profane, again with references to the Last Supper... Pasolini totally demystifies the distancing nature of religion and gives it back to ordinary people.

Under-rated at the time, La ricotta is now rightly regarded as something of a minor masterpiece of Pasolini’s cinema, in some ways a summing up of the borgate period wrapped up within a metacinematic reflection.

With such disruptive devices as intercutting color and black-and-white footage, parodying silent-film antics, and inserting scenes of youths dancing the twist, Pasolini both affirms the classical grandeur of cinematic modernism and conveys his sense of a time out of joint.

La ricotta (1962), which comes from the sketch feature RoGoPaG and stars Orson Welles (dubbed in Italian) as a director filming the crucifixion—a devastating and hilarious satire that shows Pasolini at his near best.