The storm predicted in the Locarno furnace (Switzerland) did not occur. The sky just clouded over on Wednesday, August 14, and Italian-American filmmaker Abel Ferrara, 73, arrived in his beautiful white jacket like a little floating cloud. All in black, Béatrice Dalle, almost 60 years old, sat next to her boyfriend on the sofa of a large hotel with a view of Lake Maggiore.
They look like two rock stars, a little tired, but happy and complicit. Having both returned from drugs and alcohol, they have known each other for a long time. The director of Bad Lieutenant (1992) had the French actress film in The Blackout (1997), alongside top model Claudia Schiffer. Ferrara remembers the shock caused by 37°2 in the morning (1986), by Jean-Jacques Beineix (1946-2022), who revealed Béatrice Dalle, her angelic face and her disgusted pout with life. “I was spending the summer in New York and everyone was talking about Betty Blue [titre américain du film]. People were saying, “You have to go see this girl!” Béatrice, I love her on screen and off screen », he confides.
At the Locarno International Film Festival Dalle and Ferrara promote a documentary that brings them together again, The Passion according to Béatriceby Belgian Fabrice du Welz, in theaters Wednesday November 20. The film follows the trail in Italy of filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), from his native region to his filming locations.
“A parallel with Caravaggio”
Béatrice Dalle is the main character, moving from town to town, meeting those who tell her about the sulphurous artist, the love of her life, she declares. A stopover in Rome, where Ferrara now lives, is the occasion for a discussion with the director of Pasolini (2014), with Willem Dafoe, on the last day of the man who was murdered on the beach of Ostia, southwest of Rome, in circumstances that remained mysterious.
In a silky black and white, the work of Fabrice du Welz draws an hollow portrait of Béatrice Dalle, who was 17 years old when she discovered Salo or the 120 days of Sodom (1975). “It was in a Parisian room, in Saint-Michel. With my lousy little culture that I had at the time, I said to myself: “Isn’t this the greatest anti-fascist film we’re currently seeing?” I started to be interested in him, in his writings, in his other films. In Theorem [1968]Pasolini films women, and especially Silvana Mangano, like Greek statues. Sometimes I draw a parallel with Caravaggio [peintre italien (1571-1610)], who had been accused of having used a prostitute as a model. Caravaggio had chosen the prettiest girl he knew to represent the Virgin. Because he just wanted the Virgin to be sublime, and his women to be flesh and blood”she said.
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