Blu-ray review: Pasolini

Starring: Willem Dafoe, Ninetto Davoli
Director: Abel Ferrara

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini is that it shows the notorious film director living quietly with his mother. As portrayed by Willem Dafoe (who is certainly cadaverous enough for the role), Pier Paolo Pasolini emerges as an austere, donnish figure, who lives largely in his head and keeps his taste for rough trade on the down-low.

The film charts his last day in faithful detail, interweaving scenes of intellectual discussion about poetry, film festivals and politics with dramatisations from a novel and screenplay Pasolini was working on in his final months (the last a Bunuelian fable about a pair of holy innocents who go to a modern Sodom divided into lesbian and gay sectors).

This “final 24 hours” format was an obvious go-to for Ferrara, who has used something like it before on multiple occasions. The trouble is that, apart from in the tragic way it ended, Pasolini’s last day doesn’t seem to have been very significant. Conspiracy theories abound about how Pasolini met his end, but what is surely true is that it was a pattern of behaviour that killed him, not a random bolt out of the blue. In which case, a bolder, more wide-ranging approach might have served Ferrara better.

As we listen to Pasolini giving his views on Montale and chitchatting with friends and family, there’s a sense of cast and director working hard to establish certain documentary truths, but the film doesn’t really seem engaged in trying to elucidate either him or the epoch in which he lived. It touches on certain glaring contradictions in his character – the way, for instance, he preaches communism and the evil of possessions while dwelling in chic middle class comfort and driving around in a fast car which is the envy of the working class boys he cruises – but seems reluctant to explore them in any detail.

Instead, it luxuriates in a fatalistic reverie, the feeling of an inevitable drift towards death. The circumstances of Pasolini’s murder are presented here less as the appallingly thorough and sadistic obliteration of a human being that it was than as a darkly muffled, ritualistic slaughter not unlike the demise of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

And as a slow, hypnotic dance with death, lushly shot and well acted, Ferrara’s Pasolini has its own kind of beauty and elegance, albeit one that’s a world away from the sound and fury of the Italian director’s own work. 6/10

EXTRAS
A pleasantly chatty and light-hearted 42-min Q&A with the director and some of the cast, with Dafoe emphasising their use of factual sources including Pasolini’s own words. ~ An extremely funny and engaging 23-min interview with Robin Askwith (of Confessions of a Window Cleaner fame), who describes meeting the avowedly communist director in the swanky surroundings of the Hyde Park Hotel and then parrying his requests for real-life acts of peeing and fornication on the set of his version of The Canterbury Tales. It’s a lovely piece, although you can’t help noticing his Pasolini sounds nothing like Ferrara’s. 8/10

Blu-ray review: Mississippi Burning

Starring: Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand
Director: Alan Parker

When it was first released back in 1988, this film about a notorious real-life race crime that took place in the deep South in the 1960s ran into some heat, both for its depiction of white folks riding to the rescue of the beleaguered black man and for the liberties it took with true events. Even if you think its critics had a point, it would be churlish to deny that it’s a solid, effective piece of work with its heart in the right place.

Hoping to discover the whereabouts of some missing civil rights activists, a pair of FBI descend upon a small town in Mississippi where the Clan ride round in limousines bedecked with flags. The locals have the cheek to suggest that the disappearance of the four youngsters is a publicity stunt, but as the Feds escalate their investigation, the Clan employ ever more extreme terror tactics to ensure that everyone’s mouths stay shut.

Evoking a world of sun-faded frocks and sleepy barber’s salons, director Alan Parker shows the same keen eye for a frowsty, flyblown period setting that he did in Angel Heart, but in general he quietly subordinates himself to the main purpose of the movie, which is to serve as a showcase for a meaty performance by Gene Hackman, who plays Anderson, the older and more pragmatic of the FBI agents. The heart of the script is the back and forth between Anderson and his idealistic, college-educated superior, Ward (Willem Dafoe) – that, plus the mild flirtation he had going on with the wife of one of their prime suspects (a sympathetic turn by a young Frances McDormand).

Born in the South himself, Anderson has a deep understanding of the causes of racial hatred allied to an equally strong desire to stamp it out. As he urges Ward to match the Clan’s threats and intimidation with dirty tactics of their own, his relationship with his strait-laced partner is reminiscent of the one between Sean Connery and Kevin Costner in The Untouchables – or it would be, if it wasn’t for the way that Hackman brings a sense of humour and humanity to the role as well as a belief in justice. And it’s the subtlety and charm of his performance that lifts Mississippi Burning above the average. 7/10

TRANSFER
The transfer is a little soft and grainy at times, but the exteriors are bright and sharp, with plenty of leafy detail in the scene where they wade through a swamp looking for the missing boys’ car. Close-ups are generally sharp too – there are times when you can count the freckles on Hackman’s forehead. The night scenes with flaring headlights have a cool, crisp quality, and McDormand’s pretty pastel dresses also come up nicely. 7/10

EXTRAS
9-min interview with Willem Dafoe – he grumbles about the flatness of his character and reveals that Hackman could be “cranky” on set. ~ 20-min interview with Alan Parker, who talks about writing his own script after falling out with the original screenwriter Chris Gerolmo, the challenges of filming on location (primarily in Lafayette, Alabama) and Hackman’s way of homing in on the heart of a scene. ~ !6-min interview with Chris Gerolmo, which is very informative about the process of getting a script made, and also interesting in that it differs markedly from Parker’s account in some respects. ~ Audio commentary with Alan Parker – not a very flowing commentary, but some interesting remarks emerge, as when the director reveals that they burnt down three churches in the first week of shooting. 9/10