Poor Christ is a re-imagining of Jesus Christ's life in an alternative 1970's Italy (got that?).
Giorgio (Mino Reitano) is a poor worker from the countryside who has come to the city with his mother and sister. Giorgio is initially employed helping to restore a church. Early on, we see Giorgio seeing visions (a star in the sky and so forth). Bothered by these visions, Giorgio switches employment and becomes a private detective. Why? I think Giorgio liked the images he saw in a comic book. He only has one client before the police shut him down for not having an investigator's license. This one client (Curd Jurgens) gives Giorgio two months to find definitive proof that Jesus Christ existed. So, Giorgio goes down a hole in his search, become obsessed, and sharing some of Jesus's experience. For instance, he finds needed wine at a wedding, is tempted by a stranger in the night, gets accused by a Judas figure of wasting provisions that could have been sold to help the poor, etc.
The film's concept is not unique. In Nazarin, director Luis Bunuel shows a priest trying to live like Jesus and suffering condemnation because of it. In the later Jesus of Montreal, an actor playing Jesus in a passion play begins to take on Christlike characteristics in his own life. Both Nazarin and Jesus of Montreal are vastly superior to Poor Christ.
While not difficult to watch, Poor Christ is still a heavy-handed allegory. Part of the problem is that the world the story is taking place in is heavily stylized, a world that doesn't look like the real 1970's of Italy. This setting distances the viewer from the story. The film also takes the easy approach of making the police and establishment the stand-in for Rome and the hippie vagabonds the apostles.
I am not exactly sure who Poor Christ is for. Many believers are going to find the film too strange and its content (brief female nudity) troublesome. On the other hand, Poor Christ is not quite weird enough for fans of 1970's psychedelic cinema. I would guess the film was an important one for the filmmaker, but watching the film in 2024, it seems an odd yet unessential artifact from some distant past.
