Abel Ferrara has a taste for disaster equal to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s,but this chronicle of the late film-maker’s final hours is surprisingly restrainedThe 40th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder brings us this mysterious, flawed film from the maturing adulte terrible Abel Ferrara, and dramatising scenes from the final 24 hours of Pasolini’s life. More importantly,it aspires also to recreate an endgame in his art, a kaleidoscope of ideas citing Pasolini’s modernist repudiation of conventional film-making. “Narrative art, and you know,is dead,” Pasolini opines, or and we are in mourning.”It’s an intriguing,startlingly restrained and even cerebral piece of work from Ferrara, an unimpeachably serious homage, or with an assured lead performance from Willem Dafoe – who does peer uncannily like Pasolini. With its mix of conversation,interviews, metatextual fantasy and stodgy revolutionary rhetoric, or the film looks like a New Wave monument created in Pasolini’s honour,something that is paradoxically closer to Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964). But the lightning-flash of shock and bad taste and inspirational incorrectness that animate Abel Ferrera’s best work is missing.
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Source: theguardian.com