The Pasolini Life of Christ is far and away a critical favorite, though its likely that viewers accustomed to slick and spectacular treatment of this story will be put off by this extremely stripped down and unconventional approach. It's worth keeping in mind, though, that many who expected a conquering Messiah were similarly disappointed to be confronted with a king born in a stable. The poet Pasolini made a point of declaring the death of realism, but this treatment emerges nonetheless from the Italian Neo-Realist tradition: non-professional actors, minimalist production values, improvisational performance and direction, choppy coverage and editing. For some, the low-tech style may be a distraction; for others, the method enables the presentation to transcend the stereotypes and reach a hitherto unmatched authenticity and special kind of truth.

There are lots of long shots of figures against desolate landscapes: the desert, the mountains, a lonely hill town. The best moments, however, are the close shots, reactions of authentic peasant faces: individuals observing the Baptist in action, looking on in wonder at Mary and her baby, raptly listening to Jesus the teacher, and then witnessing the showdown between Christ and the Pharisees. This film also features one of the singlemost compelling embodiments of the young Mary, mother of the newborn Savior. The actress (if she can be given a title so formal) doesn't even speak, but her face communicates powerfully what it must have been like to be a simple village teenager whose ordinary destiny is swept irrevocably away by events of overwhelming significance. The film's best scenes involve similar moments of wordless realism, shot documentary style, often with a long lens: the fishermen with their nets in boats and on the sea shore, the disciples passing out bread to the crowds.

The film excels in its crowd scenes: the Triumphal Entry is an authentic, exultant chaos. Overall, one might wish the director might have surrendered a little more fully to his images without being so hasty to keep the narrative on track; more than once, he cuts away from a picture that had not yet been fully mined of richness. Simply lingering over a shot of those baskets of bread would have had much more power than the sermonizing, and there is plenty of less-effective wordy sequences in this film: sermons straight from Scripture, from an often overly-stern, angry prophet Christ.

The soundtrack is a similar patchwork of clashing styles and tones. The richly orchestrated classical church music contrasts against both the rough texture of the film and the down-to-earth action portrayed: at times both a brilliant and a jarring juxtaposition. And would that the entire film had been scored as only a couple key scenes are, with Negro spirituals! The scene of the villagers coming to see Mary and baby while Mahalia Jackson laments "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" is perhaps the most piercing use of music in the history of cinematic Gospels.

Pasolini himself is a real puzzle: aesthete and Communist, scandal-plagued and Christ-haunted his whole tormented life, drawn from poetry to politics to scriptwriting and film. He insisted he was a non-believer yet he sought here only to make a faithful adaptation of this Gospel, which he dedicated to the memory of Pope John XXII — then continued the steady slide into ever more notorious art and life, climaxing in his shocking murder in typically "Pasolinian" (which actually became paparazzi shorthand for "homosexual low-life") style. There have been plenty of sanctimonious Gospels on film; this one's a heartfelt cry from the "tax collectors and sinners" contingent.