"Christ, or a devil? A saint, or a robber? He is a man. A man of one enemy, a brilliant antagonist, an absolute rebel. Despite his fame, he has always been a perpetual fringe, yes A hero with two personalities." This is the biographical novel "In the Hands of Angels: Pasolini, a Homosexual Life" by the famous French writer Dominique Fernandez, who won the Goncourt Literary Prize, on the back cover of Pierre Paul Pasolini's evaluation, and the author of the book combine several major events in Pasolini's life to describe his inner activities and explore his inner relationship with Italian culture. Director Abel Ferrara This is different. This atypical biopic only focuses on the last days before Pasolini's murder. Indeed, it is not easy to summarize the life of this huge contradiction in one film. His success in every field he has set foot in makes him He has become an "abnormal" who has gone too fast and too far. He has multiple contradictory labels that should not exist at the same time: Catholics, Marxists, Italian Communists, homosexuals... At the same time, he is also a writer, director, poet, film theorist . At the beginning of the film, he refers to himself as a "writer" in response to the interviewer's questions, and as he once said, his whole life is in his books because he is a writer. He calls himself "a squished, bloody snake, like a cat that doesn't want to die." And in this film, he's a myth-busting alternative icon in director Abel Ferrara's lens.
The film is the fourth collaboration between director Ferrara and actor Willem Dafoe. Year) to this film, Willem Dafoe, as the male lead, accompanies Ferrara to carry out his new thinking in audiovisual art. It seems right to choose Willem Dafoe as Pasolini. Although he speaks English most of the time, his image in the film basically conforms to our imagination of director Pasolini, with dark glasses and deep nasolabial lines. And Dafoe's strangeness brought him closer to the director's idol Pasolini. Unfortunately, Ferrara, who is no longer rough and extreme, did not give Dafoe any more in this film. There is more room to show his acting skills. In the last days of Pasolini's life, he spent more time with his family and friends, which could have left a deeper impression on us, but we failed to feel more, except In addition to acting coquettishly in front of his mother and showing the big boy characteristics of Italian men, this complex figure remains mysterious in the last moments of his life. Regarding the handling of Pasolini's murder, the director abandoned various conspiracy theories in the legend, and presented a certain contingency in historical inevitability in the most binary opposition. Male prostitutes and gangsters killed the man in the most violent way. gay. Unlike Italian director Marco Tullio Giordana's 1995 film "Pasolini, an Italian Crime", which was obsessed with finding the truth, the real murderer of Pasolini, Ferrara's The method downplays the various possibilities behind it, and the wanton violence catalyzes death. As for where the violence comes from, whether it is a country with terrorist violence or a people ruled by violence, this is not the scope of this film. When the most imaginative head of the era was run over mercilessly by the wheels, we again thought of the title Pasolini helped reporters come up with after completing the interview of the day "Everyone is in danger - we are all in danger. among". Today, more than 40 years later, how many intelligent minds are still ruthlessly terminated by violence.
The three time and space in the film are intertwined in parallel, based on the real life of Pasolini's last day as the basis and main line, flashbacks to his youth writing and sexual experiences, etc. constitute memory passages, and Ferrara is full of reverence. Imaginary movie clips done for idols. Among them, the flashbacks of Pasolini's youthful sexual experiences and his sexual scenes before his murder constitute an echo. Unfortunately, this echo is only in form. In the passages of memory and imagination, the director used voice-overs to introduce Pasolini's letters and meetings with two collaborators and friends, the famous Italian novelist Alberto Moravia and the Italian actor in the 20th century. Memories and imaginations in Pasolini's mind. Moravia founded the literary journal Nuovi Argomenti, Pasolini is one of the editors of the magazine. In Pasolini's letter to him, the director Ferrara used an unreal paradox to present a plane crash in Africa, an endless pink desert. And the African primitive people in the picture remind us of Pasolini's "One Thousand and One Nights". After the release of Pasolini's last film "The 120 Days of Sodom", which had a strong Thaadist atmosphere, Pasolini had already conceived a new film. At the time, director Ferrara used his way to interpret the fragments of Pasolini's unfinished film. From these fragments alone, it is still an imaginative and ambitious work, which is no less than a banter of the world and gender. In the "Life Trilogy" - "One Thousand and One Nights", "Ten Days" and "The Canterbury Tales". An old Italian who claimed to have seen the Messiah in the night sky (the savior appointed by God to save the world) received some kind of inspiration, and the old man looked familiar because he had too much to do with Pasolini. The second co-actor, Ninato Davali, took his servant to the train to chase after the miracle. Interestingly, the servant's name in the film was Ninato Davaoli. The trick shows the director's intentions and intentions. The two come to a gay city, which coincides with the city's carnival festival. The local residents and their same-sex partners participate together, enjoy the fun of the opposite sex one night, and then change back to gay and lesbian the next day. The old man and the servant left with their eyes wide open and continued on their journey to find the savior. They kept climbing up the endless steps that looked back to the earth in the direction of the Messiah's light, and finally they stopped, as if really understand what. Ferrara interprets a typical Pasolini-style story. Maybe because this story is too Pasolini, we can hardly feel the rough temperament and personality of Ferrara in the past. This imaginary paragraph adds a lot to the film. Let our imaginations run wild with Pasolini's unseen work. Another surprise is that we get to see Pasolini's close friend in real-life episodes, actress Laura Beatty, who has worked with him six times, played by Maria de Medello and Laura Beatty. Betty directed a documentary about Pasolini in 2001.
These details show director Ferrara's attitude. The film is more like the director's tribute to an idol than a biopic in the general sense, so we can't measure it by the standards of a biopic. As for how we should understand Pasolini and his works, perhaps it is a good choice to read Requiem: A Biography of Pasolini, published in 2013 and divided into two volumes. The evaluation of the film is naturally polarized, and it is clear at a glance by referring to the scores of the two rival film magazines in France: "Cinema Manual" five stars, "Feature" two stars.
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