Pasolini

Even cineastes with a good working knowledge of Pier Paolo Pasolini's life and works are going to struggle to navigate this capriciously intricate account of his final days in November 1975. Embracing the poet-provocateur's contention that narrative is dead, director Abel Ferrara and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci intersperse incidents from his last 48 hours with staged extracts from his unfinished novel, Petrolio, and the unfilmed allegory Porno-Teo-Kolossal. The latter's orgy sequence shares a brazen disregard for conventional screen tastes with Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini's savage denunciation of the fascist mentality. But neither these reveries nor encounters with friends and family members shed much light on either the man or the Marxist. Willem Dafoe bears a marked resemblance to Pasolini and plays him with a stately intensity. But Ferrara flits between factual and fictional episodes with an arbitrariness that extends to the desultory switches between English and Italian.