«Pasolini’s women», a beautiful journey into the sensitivity of a poet (score 8)- Corriere.it

A beautiful journey through the eyes, the sensitivity, the pain of a poet: the document (better than a documentary) by Eugenio Cappuccio “Le donne di Pasolini”, on RaiPlay, is the psychoanalytic identity card of a great man of culture always hanging to its roots, the geographical ones of Casarsa, Friuli, and those of the beloved mother Susanna Colussi, Homeric companion of the long journey interrupted by the heartbreaking cry on 2 November 75 when Pasolini was assassinated on the Lido di Ostia: «Today we have the monumental example of an intellectual heroism tactically crushed in that premeditated and organized group ambush, ill-sentenced political-criminal murder» says the director.

His film (produced by Rai Documentari and Anele, contributed by Rai Teche, Fondazione Aquileia, visible on Rai Play) is the story of an infinite, almost extrasensory emotion. Not an investigation into the last day, on the contrary the search for his places and above all for relationships with women who marked periods of his inspiration. Giuseppe Battiston retraces with measure but as an accomplice those Friulian territories, his motherland, where Pasolini suffered his first humiliations, caused by a homophobic communist party at the time. «The roots are in the mother and so, listening to her and the women who have been his life and work companions, is like taking a secondary road, a detour to hear Pier Paolo’s voice even more clearly» says the actor.

In addition to the symbiotic relationship with his mother Susanna, it is no coincidence that Madonna in the “Gospel”, with whom she had to speak every day even if she was on a set in Africa 50 km away. from a public telephone, there are four other female figures who mark her path. The Jewish translator and poet Giovanna Bemporad (who was saved from the Nazis in a way that looks like fiction, but was real life), the writer Oriana Fallaci who confesses a mysterious passion in a letter, the amphitryonic muse Laura Betti who, as a loving friend and his “non carnal” wife opened the rooms of intellectual power to him, Moravia in the lead, and then fought for the Pasolini Foundation and for the truth of the facts. And finally her sentimental attempt with Maria Callas: with her he went to review the places of youth, he shot “Medea” and he was impressed by “the total violence of her feelings without brakes”. It was the great singer’s last solo.

There are movies, clips of nostalgia, there is Battiston traveling to the little church of Versuta where the young Pasolini opened a small school with his mother, and there are beautiful and heartfelt testimonies from friends: Liliana Cavani, Dacia Maraini, Emanuele Trevi, David Grieco. Cappuccio makes us feel nostalgia for a man and his “prophecies” with waves of cinema, because such was Pasolini looking at Italian society, just like Fellini to whom, not surprisingly, the director dedicated another film. It’s a pity not to have, but there are always copyrights etc., the testimonies of Nico Naldini, cousin and friend, and Bernardo Bertolucci, his first assistant director at the time of “Accattone” and friend, but in the intertwined narrative languages, thanks to the actresses Carolina D’Alterio, Martina Massaro, Liliana Massari, Sara Maffodda and above all the very good “mother” Anna Ferruzzo, the nobility of a soul, of a simple heart, à la Flaubert emerges. A way to remember the single person of a poet, writer and filmmaker (his relationship with Totò, Magnani) and all the ramifications that bind him to us today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.