A Communist's Christ

The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a modest, unadorned movie on the life of Christ that should satisfy the yearnings of anyone who has ever suffered through the pretentious piety of multimillion-dollar orgies of Scripturama. Paradoxically, it is the work of a usually irreverent Italian Communist, Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who casts a solemn, hot-eyed Spanish student (Enrique Irazoqui) as Jesus and sends him out to preach among the peasantry with a social revolutionist's fervor. Yet Pasolini at his best has created something more noble and touching than a Marxist Messiah, and more authentic than the customary sun-kissed Hollywood Christ. The film's dialogue, for example, comes intact from the Book of Matthew (with English subtitles translated according to the English edition by Monsignor Ronald Knox).

The background is the barren landscape of Calabria in southern Italy, where flies buzz and donkeys bray through a stillness quite cordial to Biblical tradition. In desolate, crumbling villages, Pasolini chokes the narrow streets with children, animals and a startling collection of peasant faces. None are professional actors; the Apostle Judas is a Roman truck driver, the Virgin Mary in her later years is Pasolini's mother. Pasolini catches their simplicity and intensity with powerful effect. His camera seems to rove, news-reel-style, seeking truth among the halt, the healed, the healers, the doubters and the eyewitnesses involved in some ancient miracles. Occasionally, the film is as violent as history itself. The slaughter of the innocents looses an avalanche of pity and terror upon a sunny hillside, and the Crucifixion scene could scarcely be more graphic. These episodes are offset by the subtle lyricism of the flight into Egypt, when Mary turns for a last, lingering look at the humble comforts of her home.

Where Pasolini fails, and it is a substantial failure, is in the inability to match his vivid re-creation of a place and time with an equally fresh portrait of Jesus. Christ sheds the mantle of soulful martyr but still seems no more than a fierce embodiment of divine purpose, as stiff and one-dimensional as those who have gone before. The movie sags at the center, weighed down by interminable closeups and sermons. The sound track swells with passages from Bach, Mozart, Prokofiev, Webern, an African Mass and-as an odd counterpoint to the Nativity--Odetta's recording of Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child. The strength of Pasolini's Gospel rests on those moments when he forgoes static, calendar-art conventions to fill the screen with direct, provocative and eloquent glimpses of what a Biblical film might be.

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