(IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO)
**** (out of ****)
Starring Enrique Irazoqui
Directed & written for the screen by Pier Paolo Pasolini, from the Gospel According to St. Matthew
1964
136 min NR
THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti, and Tessa Bouche
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini & written by Pasolini and Dacia Maraini
1974
131 min NC17
So if you’re like me – and let’s face it, who isn’t? – you find yourself wondering how the Italian realism of “The Bicycle Thieves” turned into the operatic insanity of “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” For a stepping stone, try Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew.” Many of Hollywood’s obscenely-large Heston-esque Biblical epics were released within ten or fifteen years of Pasolini’s film. In their grandness we never feel like these places exists; their elaborate sets are always elaborate sets, and we love them for it.
Yet Pasolini’s Holy Land (southern Italy), in its low-fi “Bicycle Thieves” muddiness, looks like he found it that way. Using non-professional locals instead of actors (like Sergio Leone often did in spaghetti westerns), their splotched faces, crooked smiles, and general gross-ness speaks of a pre-industrial authenticity untouched by “The Ten Commandments.” (Even Gibson’s splendid “Passion of the Christ” is on the polished side.) Like “Andrei Roublev” and “The New World,” Pasolini doesn’t reconstruct the past so much as find places that look the same as they must have a couple thousand years ago. Or at least create that impression. “Place” is of tremendous importance in “The Gospel According to St. Matthew;” it does half the acting.
Yet with his “realism” we get an inkling of the outsized hyper-realism of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. A jump-cut is used for the curing of a leper. Commentary comes from above, as it were, on the soundtrack, which features African masses and black American spirituals. Pasolini’s style is so Spartan, so jagged, the faces and teeth so bad, that his “realism” is at once reality captured and recorded, as well as the vision of an artist.
St. Matthew’s Gospel provides a perfect Spartan text for Pasolini. Outdoing even Branagh’s “Hamlet” in literary faithfulness, he sticks to the next and nothing but the text, neither adding nor removing a single word of dialogue. Which means the Virgin Mary says absolutely nothing. Instead, in an early scene, she merely stands, pregnant, as Joseph stares at her. Distraught, he wanders off, then he lays down for a nap. When he wakes up, there stands the Angel of the Lord.
With his intense face and small body, the guy playing Jesus (Enrique Irazoqui) looks vaguely like E.T., and there’s something otherworldly about the punchy, declarative way he instructs his disciples. Instead of reciting by rote what we’ve heard for the last two millennia, Pasolini’s Jesus is confidently urgent. I love the interlude of Jesus simply walking down the stairs, teaching his followers, without once looking back at them.
But here I am being dry and bookish, when “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” has a dramatic, whirlwind quality to it. By the end I was worried that Pasolini was going to suddenly veer in a new direction, to make a metaphorically resurrection. Then there was such joy on the faces of those running to see their friend again, someone who had died but had come back. Pasolini breathes life into a story we’ve heard again and again; I was worried He wasn’t going to come back, and I was glad when He did. My only complaint is that the last shot doesn’t last long enough. “I will be with you until the consummation of the word.” I wish it lingered longer before “The End.”
“Place” is also of the utmost importance in Pasolini’s “The Arabian Nights,” even if the subject matter couldn’t be more different. Bawdy, vulgar, packed with nudity, and bordering on the pornographic, like one colossal dirty joke. In my mind I know that everyone must be wearing a costume and all manner of little tricks are being pulled to create this “past,” but everything is so low-fi, so grungy, with such limitless horizons, that I really felt I was watching a thousand-year-old film.
Part of the fun of “The Arabian Nights” is the literary maze it weaves. Pasolini has taken the Scheherezade story – in which the doomed maiden tells a new story every night to keep from being executed – and removed the frame story! Instead, each story contains a storyteller who tells the next story before his story has even finished. Then, three stories later, we return to an earlier story, and the whole things becomes endlessly, gloriously convoluted, like two dozen short films tied together and overlapping.
Linking it all is a poor boy’s quest for a beautiful lover he accidentally sold into slavery. His wanderings take him into many different lands and beds. Pasolini claimed “The Arabian Nights” was to be without ideology and, in a way, it is. He seems to have no opinion or judgment to pass on his endless stream of pleasure-seekers – or perhaps his condescension for their failings is merely perfectly matched by his affection for them.
Finished May 13th, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Friday & Saturday Night
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