Though it includes extremely explicit sex scenes and concludes with the beating and murder of its subject, Abel Ferrara’s portrait of the last days of writer-director Pier Paolo Pasolini is surprisingly restrained. It’s as interested in the curiously calm domestic life of its protagonist — played behind Pasolini’s real tinted glasses by Willem Dafoe — as in his fantasies and excesses, which are depicted in the manner of Paul Schrader’s Mishima with extracts from memoirs and an unproduced screenplay.
In its vision of an artist being engulfed by the world he has observed, it makes a surprisingly apt book-end for Ferrara’s first feature, The Driller Killer