Q&A with Uberto Pasolini: “Life is important, acknowledge that of others, do not judge it and be good at yours…”

 The title of this article may sound like the Ten Commandments of life coaching but this is how the Italian director Uberto Pasolini feels about life right now. Indeed, for him, – and for most of us - life and how we live it is important.  He shared his preoccupations on that delicate matter in his new poignant and meditative film: Still Life.

Uberto Pasolini is famous for producing the award-winning film The Full Monty among others and he is back with his latest feature film, the above mentioned Still Life, that had its premiere and first festival bow at this year’s Venice Film Festival where it screened in the Orizzonti section and snatched the Orizzonti Award for Best Director. Now, his new work opened the Warsaw Film Festival.

Still Life follows John May, a London funeral officer who arranges funerals for those who lived and died alone and attends them so that these people do not go alone to the afterlife.

Still Life is the product of a blend of Pasolini’s own life and an article he read in an English newspaper and more precisely, an interview with a woman who did this particular job for the Westminster Council borough. In fact, as Pasolini recounted, he started following another two funeral officers in Lewisham and Southwark, in South London. He discovered that the general state of the matter is a most unfortunate preponderance of either non-located relatives or ones that “have no interest in being there or participating in any way in the funeral of the person in question”. After attending as well a reunion of all the funeral officers of greater London, an assembly of thirty people, the director found out that the majority of them organize ceremonies but are, however, not present due to their own busy lives or to the fact that they perform their jobs in a highly bureaucratic and rather inhuman way. Pasolini admitted being very much struck by the “idea of people who have been forgotten at the end of their lives and are even forgotten at the last moment they spend on Earth”.

In fact, the image of a lonely grave – an image we see at the end of the film – prompted him to envisage making a film on this subject. It started as an examination of a social phenomenon, that of isolation in the metropolis of the Western world (but also in smaller cities), especially surrounding the section of the population who might have difficulties in connecting with their peers and who for that reason create relationships through the internet which are, to his mind, not real, “give and take” relationships. Deeming his life truly lucky and privileged, he became interested in lives different than his own and with them, he discovered an entirely different world. It became, however, much more personal as it came to be an analysis of “what it meant to be alone and to be lonely”. As he talked about loneliness, Pasolini expressed with certain sadness that he has felt it in the last few years of his life as he is divorced from his wife, Rachel Mary Berkeley Portman, the composer if his films, with his children living between the two parents “… you open the door and it’s all dark and there are no noises and no smells, and no nothing, no life”. And sadly, indeed, he has felt the loneliness of these moments and tried to imagine what it meant for them to be the constant in one’s life.

In that sense, Still Life also underlines the director’s attachment to the importance of his being more interested in other people’s lives, not just those of his family and the people he comes daily in contact with but also of those of people who he would not normally want to meet or talk to, whether it is his neighbor, whom he, for instance, did not know before he made this film or even the mere possibility of having coffee in a bar in the morning and have “just that exchange and interest in somebody’s life [that] makes one richer”.  Pasolini’s message to today’s younger generations is one about the significance of openness to other people coming into their lives, of remaining open to contact in order to avoid meeting the fate of some of his characters.

Moreover, the predominance of the color blue as well as desaturated colors at the beginning of the film translate in a way the “blues” the director is feeling at this stage of his life, his feelings and preoccupations about life’s emptiness without people in it   and loneliness. He confesses the protagonist was created after his own persona, “it’s me unfortunately, that’s what I’m like… picking up crumbs and putting them back in the coffee…. I eat tuna like that…”. The comic relief in Still Life comes from the repetition and the routine as well as the reality and truthfulness of the premise and the construction of the narrative, a “piece of comedy that when it’s real, it feels truthful”. If one lives alone like he does, “you do the same thing, you walk in through your front door when coming back from work or somewhere and you hang your coat always on the same peg”. The repetition to him is a completely natural component of life: “it’s how we live, how we function especially when we don’t have people to interfere with our lives…”.

What Pasolini wishes to show with Still Life is that life does not end with death.

And the title of his film, in spite of its ambiguous nature, is the perfect definition of the director’s message: “it’s Still Life because it is a life that is not moving, it’s Still Life because it’s still a life despite the fact that it’s not moving, it’s a still life because it’s a life made of stills, photographs. You can read it in different ways”. To him, the need to engage with other people and remain alive by doing so is crucial as well as recognizing other people’s lives “which is what the central character does, what he wants to do when he collects those things in people’s apartments to write eulogies, is remembering the world which is not listening that this person had a life and that life has to be recognized before it’s forgotten forever”.

In addition, Pasolini stresses that John May is not a sad about his own loneliness, that he does not feel lonely. He is just solitary. And it is important that we do not feel pity for him, nor judge him and in this regard, “it is still a life and we shouldn’t judge anybody’s life”. Pasolini advises us to “recognize other people’s lives and don’t judge them too much” and to be “good at [ours]”, an advice I am most inclined to take seriously and follow thoroughly. And we should all. Thank you, Pasolini…