Nerolio

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.

Aurelio Grimaldi is famous for his very personal questionable visions that often end up talking about discomfort. In these films, the discomfort is often depicted in homosexuality. I would say that his vision, shared or not, it is always the result of interest and debate, and the same happens in this film, "inspired by" Pasolini, where the name of the great Bolognese artist is never pronounced. Of course, the references are explicit and obvious, but as the same Grimaldi said, the film can refer to any artist, and the vision that comes out of the poet is which that the director guesses about him; how to say, being the Grimaldi's Pasolini, the poet could not be described except in accordance with what Grimaldi thinks of him, as he imagines, and therefore does not necessarily reflecting some historical truth. On the other hand, the tragedy is still unresolved and not clear. This part, in fact, I would rather it had not been included in the film, because I found it really too personal. Everything else, however, I liked it. I do not think it comes out a distorted picture of the great artist, even the dialogs seem very "Pasolinian". Even Cavicchioli is awfully similar to Pa', and all this creates a really good atmosphere in the viewer. A title that would certainly recommend, even if only for the beautiful words of the "poet" of the film.