Critic Reviews

The blend of pornography and humor, obnoxiousness and elegance, sweetness and cruelty reminds you that this is, above all, an Abel Ferrara movie. And the splendor of Pasolini lies in its essentially collaborative nature.

Biopics ascribe titanic importance to a subject's every gesture, but Ferrara stresses the reality of creation, of its ordinary activities that nonetheless give an artist a sense of fulfillment.

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.

It’s a work of startling maturity from this incorrigible tearaway, a minor-key dream that finally turns towards darkness.

Ferrara has come up with something pretty special here: a subtle, seductive, lamp-lit hymn to one artist’s talents from another in the process of rediscovering his own.

To be fair, the full impact probably depends on some prior Pasolini knowledge, but even those coming in fresh will appreciate a haunting portrait of an artist destroyed by the anticommunist prejudices he fought to tear down.

“Narrative art is dead – we are in a period of mourning”; “To scandalise is a right, to be scandalised a pleasure”; “Refusal must be great, absolute, absurd…” Abel Ferrara’s infatuated tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini is littered with such gnomic bon mots, which could apply equally to either director.

And yet the movie never errs in its sincerity, which extends all the way to the decision to depict Pasolini’s murder in graphic detail.

It’s an absorbing portrait, particularly compelling when relying on Pasolini’s own words, which we hear verbatim through original letters and interviews.

With this determination to eschew simple explanations, to avoid being reductive about the cause and effect of an artist’s work and life, and to remain true to the cloudy circumstances surrounding Pasolini’s murder, comes a troubling directorial decision to turn the man’s death into a symbol — of what is unclear.