In ways both conventional and not, director Abel Ferrara pivots to the biopic with Pasolini. Fictionalizing the final day of filmmaker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini’s life with Willem Dafoe playing the provocateur, the film arrives to American audiences several years after its debut at the Venice Film Festival with a curious air of continuing examination. Ferrara may largely employ traditional true life narrative tactics for studying famous figures, but it darts in and out of the artist’s memory and creative imagination like smoke, closing on its subject with more ellipsis than finality.
filmmixtape 