Retrospective: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Patreon)

A middle-aged Italian coldly walks out on his pregnant teenage bride. Their initial wordless confrontation is shot like a Sergio Leone standoff: shoulders up, wordless, combative. A full shot of the bride, adorned like a Madonna from Byzantine iconography, does not move the man. He is not a saint; he is a civilian caught in the war in heaven.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew is contemporary in nearly every way. There are bits of First Century Judea in Pasolini's Gospel, but Pasolini has read the Gospels and found Southern Italy in them. In the Sixties, Italia meridionale was to the Italian Boot as Appalachia is to middle America. The economic boom in the North was created by deforestation of the South; the South was a backwater region where people could really use a Messiah.

Pasolini found his Judea in the redneck quarters of his home country. His actors speak with what we would consider hillbilly accents; most of them are not actors, as was common in Italian neorealist cinema. Pasolini's Gospel of Matthew is made of people desperate to gain a new life.

It's a shame the film isn't particularly watchable. Neorealism always tripped me up with its commitment of "let's make a statement" at the expense of "let's make a movie." And Pasolini's endeavor to copy the structure of the Gospel, while successful, is rather an endurance challenge. I stand by what I said about the Passion being more watchable than this.