The Gospel According to St. Matthew

My second movie for the Singapore Film Festival was The Gospel According to St. Matthew, directed by the famous Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini is a well-known Marxist homosexual who had an illustrious, but highly controversial career in film-making. For that, he suffered a mysterious and violent death at the age of 53. My interest in the movie stemmed from two sources - my background as a Christian, and a certain curiousity about how the film would turn out, considering Pasolini's controversial background.

The movie takes excerpts from the Book of Matthew. As a whole, however, it follows the Book of Matthew very closely. There were certain interesting features to note. The devil who tempts Jesus appears in the movie not as someone with horns (as I had imagined), but as one in a human form who wore crimson robes. It also gave me a view of another side of Jesus, one that is not commonly portrayed in the churches or during sermons. Initially, I was under the impression that Jesus was a nice-guy type of person, so I was quite surprised to see a stern-looking Jesus who goes around rebuking the the Israelites who live in sin, and the Pharisees. There is a difference between reading about how Jesus rebukes the Pharisees in the bible and actually watching it on screen.

The film takes many close-up shots of people's faces at somewhat uncomfortable angles, and if it were not for the fact that this was 1960s movie-making, one would have been able to see the facial pores of the characters depicted in the film. This is not necessarily a weakness, however, Such a focus on the characters does have the effect of permitting one to see every character's expression when placed in various situations.

Although it is clear that the movie was shot on a low-budget, it left a deeper impression in me than many of the other gospel movies that I had watched previously. The black-and-white nature of the film and the use of ordinary actors gave the movie a certain sense of authenticity, as it conveyed the image of an era from a long time ago. Many of these actors were very ordinary people, and you could often empathize with how they felt. Overall, I enjoyed the movie and would certainly recommend it to other people.