So this is a weird movie in concept. The Italian director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was a gay atheist Marxist; his other most famous movie is Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is infamously offensive and has been banned in multiple countries. So you’d think this would be a subversive take on a Bible story, but… nope! It’s a straight-up, super-faithful retelling of the Gospel of Matthew, just like it says; apparently even all the dialogue — which there’s not a lot of — is straight from the Bible.

It’s not even doing one of those things where it tries to put Jesus into historical context; while Pasolini does do a lot of the things that are associated with Italian neorealism (in particular almost all of the actors are amateurs), and scenes come off as more realistic than romantic by and large, he was explicitly looking to tell the mythical story, the one that has been modified by 2000 years of interpretation and retelling. So he did literally zero research into making it authentic, and costumes are drawn from Renaissance-era paintings rather than what people of that time might have actually worn.

The end result is impressive in its way; it’s clearly a movie with an artistic vision behind it, created with a thought to making art rather than as part of the evangelical-industrial complex. But… at the end of the day, it’s telling a super-familiar story in little fragmented pieces, because that’s what’s in the Bible; and if you aren’t particularly interested in this story, it’s hard to say that it rises up to such a level of artistry that it’s worth seeking out anyway.

Also, though, it really was interesting to me how much the disjointedness makes sense if and only if you grew up in a Christian environment where you’ll have read picture books of the life of Jesus, and have that ultra-familiarity with the episodes here. If you were new to Christianity, or had only heard of it in broad outline without getting into the fine details, I feel like this would be just as incomprehensible as The Color of Pomegranates was to me.

ALSO ALSO: Because the evangelical-industrial complex is a thing, there is of course an English-dubbed and colorized (and shortened; it cuts out 40+ minutes) version of this film, which actually makes it really hard to find the actual version; after I finished the movie, I clicked through a few minutes of the colorized version, and I have to say, hats off to them, they somehow took this stylistically interesting film and turned it into the kind of cheeseball concoction that’d be perfect for a Bible study group to watch.