Who Killed Pasolini?

1995, Movie, NR, 101 mins

Who Killed Pasolini?: Review

WHO KILLED PASOLINI? | PASOLINI, AN ITALIAN CRIME | PASOLINI, UN DELITTO ITALIANO

This unenlightening docudrama investigates the 1975 murder of Italian writer/director/cultural gadfly Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose final film, SALO, is probably the most notorious art-house gross-out picture ever shot. When Pasolini, an openly gay Communist, was beaten by a 17-year-old hustler and crushed to death with his own Alfa Romeo, he was portrayed by some as the victim of his own lifelong fascination with violence and squalor. But rumors quickly surfaced that there was more to the murder, and director Marco Tullio Giordana assembles evidence that Pasolini was assassinated, and the subsequent investigation deliberately thwarted and bungled. Who was responsible? The Mafia, the Communists, the Fascists? Beats us. Giordana doesn't know either, and rehashes the usual conspiracy theories in the form of a docudrama whose leaden pace and glum cinematography recalls cheap, '70s Italian policiers. leave a comment