A no-compromise film on the latest days of the most no-compromise Italian poet and filmmaker of the century. Maybe the first well-known artist to reveal his homosexuality in words and acts, the film examines the days of Pasolini's notoriety which gave him the possibility to do such things that anonymity would have denied him. We're introduced to his multiple fellatio in Sicily narrated about in his posthumous book "Petrolio", to his nightly hunts for "fresh flesh", to his irreconcileable relation with the critics, so often unable to see beyond their inhibited and bourgeois education, and with the wishing-to-be-published young writers, prone to lose their virginity to get a favourable recension. The film is heavily claustrophobic (most of it happening within the artist's home-studio, in his automobile and in the aspirant writer's small flat), just like the life of the artist, locked in the role of conscious victim living within a dumb culture, whose major wish is to normalize every personal and artistic expression. Contradictory enough, the same normalizing aim reigns in his relationship with his mother, to whom he reports fake criticisms to have her believe he's still in the favour of the critics and towards whom he has a fastidious guilty attitude for one past soft-core pedophiliac experience he had some time before. So far, so much has been written and told and seen about Pasolini, that hard is the task to whoever wished to shock the audience with images of and about him: I'm afraid Grimaldi didn't make it. And of the bigotry of the Italian culture (in those and these days) we were already aware.
Nerolio
(1996)
It's hard to show anything shocking about Pasolini: Grimaldi didn't make it
6 February 1999