Pasolini (2014) review

Somber recreation of the last day Italian poet, novelist and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (Willem Dafoe) spent in his native Italy (and on Earth), beginning with him editing the extremely controversial Salò, describing a new project he's working on, spending time with his Mom, talking about his 'process' and, finally, picking up a teenage hustler and ending up dead on the beach (he was run over by his own car).  Dafoe does as good a job as possible depicting the artist - or as close as anyone else is going to get - and the scenes of just him talking are transfixing ("Hell is rising, and it's coming at you"), but it is jarring when it keeps cutting back and forth between 1975 and Ferrara's interpretation of Pasolini's story about two men - one of them played by Ninetto Davoli, Pier's real-life lover - who follow a star in the sky to a town where, once a year, gay men and lesbians fornicate to in order to 'continue the human race.'  It runs a slight eight-four minutes long, and is perhaps too taken with recreating the "printed story" of Pasolini's murder (read: assassination) than speculating what actually happened (was it the Mafia? the government?), though I suspect that might be due to Ferrara's concern for his own safety.