Pasolini
NYFF Favorites
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1h 24m
Directed by Abel Ferrara | 87 mins | 2014
The quotidian Roman life and the imaginary worlds of Pier Paolo Pasolini intermingle in Ferrara’s retelling of the final days in the life of the 50-year-old filmmaker, writer, and public intellectual in a lovely, haunting bricolage that includes text from his doomy final interview and envisaged scenes from an unmade final film and an incomplete novel, Petrolio. Willem Dafoe, regally exhausted, is the spitting image of the murdered director, and Pasolini’s beloved muse Ninetto Davoli returns to “finish” his friend’s work, but Ferrara wisely never attempts to merely ape Pasolini’s style, instead offering one iconoclastic artist’s tribute to another, a biopic that busts the boundaries of the form and a passion project decades in the imagining that gives Pasolini’s final moments on the beach at Ostia the terrible sanctity of the Passion.
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