This Friday sees the belated Chicago premiere of Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini (2014), a reverential consideration of the Italian poet, novelist, essayist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Set during the final days of Pasolini’s life in 1975, the movie opens with the artist looking at scenes of what would turn out to be his final film, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. (The Gene Siskel Film Center will revive that shocking masterpiece this week to coincide with its run of Pasolini.) Yet as Ferrara’s film progresses, it becomes clear that the Bronx-born director is less interested in considering Pasolini as a filmmaker than as a public intellectual; Pasolini hinges on scenes in which the Italian author (played movingly by Willem Dafoe) elucidates his critique of the modern world to curious journalists. The movie may not offer a comprehensive view of Pasolini’s life and work, but it does convey the seismic impact of his intervention into European culture.
Teorema Apart from his final feature, Salo, this is probably Pier Paolo Pasolini’s most controversial film, and to my mind one of his very best, though it has the sort of audacity and extremeness that send some American audiences into gales of derisive, self-protective laughter (1968). The title is Italian for “theorem,” in this case a mythological figure: an attractive young man (Terence Stamp) who visits the home of a Milanese industrialist and proceeds to seduce every member of the household—father, mother (Silvana Mangano), daughter (Anne Wiazemsky), son, and maid (Laura Betti). Then he leaves, and everyone in the household undergoes cataclysmic changes. Pasolini wrote a parallel novel of the same title, part of it in verse, while making this film; neither work is, strictly speaking, an adaptation of the other, but each deals with the same elements, and the stark poetry of both is like a triple-distilled version of Pasolini’s view of the world—a view in which Marxism, Christianity, and homosexuality are forced into mutual and scandalous confrontations. It’s an “impossible” work: tragic, lyrical, outrageous, indigestible, deeply felt, and wholly sincere. —Jonathan Rosenbaum
Hail Mary Blasphemy is just about the last thing on Jean-Luc Godard’s mind in this modern-day (1985) transposition of the nativity story; just as he did in First Name: Carmen, Godard has placed a mythic story in a cramped everyday setting to see if there is still any connection between the immediate and the eternal, the flesh and the spirit, the purely fortuitous and the transcendently ordered. The mysteries are respected, and even evoked with awe during a ravishing centerpiece sequence that cuts between Mary’s anguished attempts to understand what is happening to her body and a magisterial series of sunsets and landscapes. The real scandal, for anyone who has followed Godard through his Marxist period, is how much genuine spiritual longing the film contains—no longer content with a materialist analysis of the state of the world, he’s attempting here to film the intangible. —Dave Kehr v
