Unsurprisingly, these are the most impactful scenes of the film. His death is depicted as a spontaneous hate crime when a group of homophobic thugs catch them together. Cruising for rough trade in his Alfa Romeo, Pasolini picks up a street hustler ( Damiano Tamilia), buys him dinner and drives him to the beach at Ostia on the outskirts of Rome for sex. Unlike anything else in this film, that tragedy unfolds in straight-ahead dramatic fashion. Despite setting up Pasolini’s perception of having personally paid the price for his outspokenness, Ferrara doesn’t buy into the many conspiracy theories that have circulated for years around the artist’s death. This material may connect with Italian audiences directly touched by that debate, but it’s likely to remain academic and uninvolving to most everyone else. Those views distanced him even from much of the intellectual left during his lifetime, and many observers of post- Berlusconi Italian society would argue that Pasolini’s bleak outlook on the direction the country was headed has proven prophetic. Pressed to expand on his uncompromising anti-establishmentarianism, Pasolini reflects that everyone’s a victim and everyone’s guilty in a violent life built on principles of acquisition and destruction. Later, we sit in as journalist Furio Colombo ( Francesco Siciliano) conducts what would be Pasolini’s final interview, published in La Stampa under the title, “We Are All in Danger.” He speaks about the national institutional failure of education, politics, culture and media, about the collapse of an entire social system. Accused in an interview of having abandoned his militancy, he claims to be more political than ever. Just back from a trip to Sweden, Pasolini is in the midst of strategizing a way around the censors on his scandalous final film, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, supporting his view that sex is political. The film assembles a collage of fragments - some brief, some extended - from the final day of the artist’s life in 1975. VIDEO Watch Willem Dafoe Channel Pasolini in New Biopic Trailer They adopt that rejection of structured narrative and pursuit of formal experimentation in a brave but scattershot attempt to match style with subject. Pasolini wonders if his chosen form - a mix of essay, journalism, criticism, personal letters and poetry - will have the clarity to express what he hopes to convey about a protagonist bearing strong similarities to himself.įerrara and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci appear to have wondered the same. “We are in a period of mourning.” He explains that an author’s relationship to the form he creates is more important than his relationship to narrative.Įarlier, in a letter to Alberto Moravia, he prepares his fellow writer and friend to read the manuscript of an unorthodox, massively ambitious novel-in-progress, the incomplete text of which would be posthumously published as Petrolio. “Narrative art, as you well know, is dead,” proclaims Pasolini in one of several letters heard in voiceover.