Having churned out six films in four years, Abel Ferrara is clearly feeling unstoppable, though judging by his latest, a little down time might not go amiss. The 71-year-old has come out with a grubby and ludicrous period piece about the Franciscan Capuchin friar Padre Pio and his proximity to a half-forgotten massacre in the Puglian town of San Giovanni Rotondo, where in 1920, 13 members of Italy’s emerging socialist movement were shot by local police.
Played by Shia LaBeouf with a permanently pained expression and a beard like a disintegrating doormat, Pio is tortured by demonic visions and apparently also the business of having to take confession from his hapless flock, at whom he ends up screaming profanities on a number of occasions.
“Shut the f— up and say Christ is Lord!” he repeatedly bellows at a wiry local man – inexplicably played by the actress Asia Argento – who admits to harbouring lustful thoughts about his teenage daughter. It’s the sort of ministry you might expect to hear in a film from the director of King of New York and Bad Lieutenant, but LaBeouf’s all-wailing, all-tooth-gnashing performance comes over as masochistic showboating, while the camera lingers on the bungee lines of saliva dangling from his lips.
Perhaps the idea is that Pio’s turbulent spiritual journey is occurring in tandem with the rise of Italian fascism, and the souls of the nation and of this saint-in-the-making both simultaneously hang in the balance. (The film begins with the local menfolk returning from the First World War, bearing the physical and psychological scars of the conflict.) But the thematic connection is hard to pin down, in part because LaBeouf is essentially absent from the narrative strand in which the massacre itself takes place, and spends most of his limited screen time in drab monastic chambers, praying, shouting, crouching in the corner with his clothes off, and being tormented by visions of a naked young woman French-kissing the iconography.
Meanwhile, outdoors, the local labourers are getting into Lenin and Marx, pushing back against their grindingly bleak employment conditions, and making plans to run a socialist candidate in the coming local elections. Ruinously, Ferrara has made his Italian actors perform their dialogue in English: the aim was presumably to make LaBeouf’s performance sound less out of place, but the result is an entire supporting cast visibly wrestling with their natural accents in every scene, and who end up delivering their lines with all the nuance of a text-to-speech app. In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.
Cert tbc, 104 mins. In cinemas from Jan 26