La Ricotta
1963 · 35m · Italy
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative, tender
A starving film extra named Stracci is cast as the Good Thief in a lavish biblical production depicting the Crucifixion, but while the vain director and indifferent bourgeois crew ignore his plight, he desperately scrounges for food and ultimately dies of overeating on the cross — a tragicomic martyrdom of the sub-proletariat.
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Pasolini puts Orson Welles in a director's chair quoting Pasolini at the camera while a sub-proletariat extra dies on a Crucifixion set — the layers do not stop. Mannerist tableaux and class rage at the same lunch.
Pasolini's Mannerist tableau vivants alongside Welles reading the director's own self-indictment is one of the most theologically serious gestures in Italian cinema. Archive hosts a watchable print.
Pasolini's color/black-and-white split between the Mannerist-tableaux Crucifixion shoot and Stracci's hungry reality is the structural joke that lands the political tragedy. Welles delivering Pasolini's own words to camera is the kind of meta-casting that only works because the director means it.
Reviews
Oddly and blasphemously hilarious, with slapstick antics, compulsive ricotta consumption and playfully impish jabs at everyone from Christ to Fellini.
La Ricotta works as a parody on Hollywood-styled religious epics, false religious faith, harsh life of the lower class, and revelation on the bitterness of life as an outsider.