This for me is Pasolini's best film. I return to it again and again. I could not agree less with the first comment posted here. It's Pasolini's most politically biting film by far, most on the line, most provocative. All out directness, no compromising. The assault on the refreshing (for a Pasolini film), depiction of modern life, takes place with an arresting synthesis of ultra left wing demands for total revolution alongside Pasolini's preoccupations with the mysterious insides of religion. The enigma/stranger is said to be the symbolic "Christ" not the devil, as the previous commenter thinks. This is what gives the film it's bite, as the whole complexity of Christian revelation & conversion, is extraordinarily concocted into this figure who transforms all he touches, provoking collapse and crisis in all and everyone. The anatomy of the failure of the bourgeoisie entity is total. There is no escape from the social contradiction of the condition - Pasolini points to all the usual routes of escape and follows the logic to it's inevitable failure in each case.- he knows his stuff. -
The film came out in 1968, and for me very much belongs to that white hot moment, when Euopean artistic dissenters demanded absolute social change. It sits along side films like Goddard's Le Chiniose. It's message still resonates today, in our landscape of spectral and banished Marx. Interstingly, this film was nominated for some award from the Vatican when it came out, which is amusing because Pasolini spent much time being condemned by them. It also touches on the interesting game Pasolini played when tackling the social politics of his Italy. By playing with religious ideas, Pasolini could court the Vatican's responses, but he also smuggles in hidden and ambiguous meanings which are reminiscent of the sort of game playing that went on between film makers and Communist governments in the old Eastern Block. For me that game playing is at Pasolini's best in this film, where the enigma (Christ) is a sexual seducer of men, women and adolescent boys and girls. Sex, madness and the Christian mystery as Marxist revolution- its a bomb! Be blown away........
The film came out in 1968, and for me very much belongs to that white hot moment, when Euopean artistic dissenters demanded absolute social change. It sits along side films like Goddard's Le Chiniose. It's message still resonates today, in our landscape of spectral and banished Marx. Interstingly, this film was nominated for some award from the Vatican when it came out, which is amusing because Pasolini spent much time being condemned by them. It also touches on the interesting game Pasolini played when tackling the social politics of his Italy. By playing with religious ideas, Pasolini could court the Vatican's responses, but he also smuggles in hidden and ambiguous meanings which are reminiscent of the sort of game playing that went on between film makers and Communist governments in the old Eastern Block. For me that game playing is at Pasolini's best in this film, where the enigma (Christ) is a sexual seducer of men, women and adolescent boys and girls. Sex, madness and the Christian mystery as Marxist revolution- its a bomb! Be blown away........