Pier Paolo Pasolini’s career is one of many glaring contradictions, all of which are congruous with his talent as a director. His cinema is both lyrical, poetic with tendencies toward masochistic, scatology (mostly attributed to his Fascist allegory Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), with roots in the neorealist tradition. He’s also a mystic, favoring weighty literary adaptations later in his career, with bawdy, earthy realism as their anchor to their mythic proportions. Pasolini was an outed and bold Marxist and atheist, so in checking off the list of what makes Pasolini distinctly Pasolini, he doesn’t sound like the candidate for a movie about the life and teaching of Christ, right?

Well, if history’s taught us anything it’s that sometimes the least likely candidate is the best candidate, and many have gone on record (including the Vatican press) stating that The Gospel According to St. Matthew is one of the best and most faithful film adaptations of one of the Gospels. Being made with such unemphatic dedication (the bulk of the dialog was culled directly from the text) as the director's passion, and respect as a writer of prose found the material spoke for itself.

There can be some understandable hesitations to the film, and selling a neorealist (which, to many means rough-hewn with a small budget) depiction of the titular gospel might not seem all that alluring. But Pasolini’s wields substantial power in this form of spiritual art and allegorical fable and operates on a wavelength that so many other filmmakers can’t grasp: that "passion" isn’t equated by pain. Apparently, Mel Gibson missed this for his torture porn masquerading as historical realism, his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, but that more or less sums up Gibson's career as a director, which is another topic in itself.