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The affliction of Accattone, the pietàs of Mamma Roma, La Ricotta's astringent vaudeville, set-up for Pier Paolo Pasolini's illumination of il Vangelo as a vérité interplay of radicals. The nonbeliever's paradoxical "nostalgia for faith" exalts quotidian mysteries, the Holy Land is right there on Mediterranean shores, lumpy Basilicata peasants populate the pageantry. Joseph enters as a paunchy cuckold frowning at his mustached child-bride, Mary's bulging belly is explained by a tousled angel at the edge of the slums. Sloping rocky mountains provide an uncommon view of the Nativity, the Magi's wordless visit is suffused with Odetta's sublime moan ("Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child") before Herod's massacre changes the timbre. A cut from the sacred toddler in makeshift toga to John the Baptist in the river introduces Jesus (Enrique Irazoqui) swathed in black, unibrow like a slash across a high Catalonian forehead. "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." The apostles are Stromboli fishermen and hunky boys roughhousing with nets, the miracles are plain cutaways, Pasolini has other fish to fry. How to articulate a subversive manifesto? The Sermon on the Mount is thundering agitprop, a Dziga Vertov Group filibuster practically, a stubbly face swept up in ferocity before shifting backgrounds. Pisanello and coarse-grained tapestries, Bach and Missa Luba, "not the God of the dead but of the living." The glowering firebrand is all business until a shower of hosannas from urchins prompts a rare smile, a chiaroscuro close-up in the woods isolates the prophet in his moment of fear. Salome's dance is a bashful teen's recital for a pouch-eyed aesthete, the Sanhedrin tribunal is viewed by a jittery news camera. Crucifixion, resurrection, revolution. "There shall not be left a stone upon another thrown down," a political and cinematic declaration if ever there was one. Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |