About

"The refined one and the lumpen-proletarian
in the same hierarchic order of feeling,
both outside history,
in a world with no way out
except through sex and the heart,
with no profundity except in the senses.
In which joy is joy, pain pain."
Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Desire for Wealth of the Roman Lumpenproletariat (1986)

Derek Jarman plays Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) in this reconstruction of the Italian director's final night before being murdered on a beach in Ostia, outside Rome. 17-year-old hustler Giuseppe Pelosi was charged with the murder soon after Pasolini's body was discovered, and the case closed with the verdict the crime was a sexual liaison gone wrong. Julian Cole's film dramatises events in the lead up to Pasolini's death and suggests he wasn't murdered by the young hustler, but in an assignation organised by the Italian state. Jarman's voiceover frames the action, reading from Pasolini's Roman Poems (1986), while our protagonist cruises hustlers in an alleyway and imagines salvation in the desert.

Throughout his career Jarman felt a great affinity with Pasolini, describing the director as a "kindred spirit". One of his many unrealised projects includes a study of Pasolini's final days called P.P.P. in the Garden of Earthly Delights, the synopsis of which was published in Afterimage 12 (1985).

R18+