Pasolini's contribution to the Italian-French anthology film Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger), which includes five episodes by different directors based on Jesus' parabels and canonical gospels.
EN
“In this short, Pasolini’s beloved Ninetto Davoli skips gaily down the via Nazionale in Rome clutching a giant paper flower. Intercut with his progress are shots of politicians talking, bombs falling, and the war in Vietnam. God calls to Ninetto out of a cloud. ‘Curlyhead,’ says God, ‘can’t you see what is happening all around you?’ But of course Curlyhead can’t. So God invokes the parable of the barren fig tree, cut down for failing to bear fruit even if it was not yet the season. Ninetto, still oblivious, is punished for his innocence and run over by a bus—a victim, as so often in Pasolini, of a justice which is not just.”
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith1
- 1Costica Bradatan and Camil Ungureanu, eds., Religion in Contemporary European Cinema: The Postsecular Constellation (New York: Routledge, 2017), 69-70.