Totò che visse due volte pays homage to the films of Pasolini. The film is somewhere about half way between Il Decamerone (in its mood) and La ricotta (with explicit references) and is almost a reversal of his Il vangelo secondo Matteo. The stories look as if they were made by a post-Salò Pasolini, be it without the terror of that film and with a different tone for death and the afterlife. This most pornographic, or rather sex-hostile film by Ciprì and Maresco is blasphemous in a disconsolate way, more than their earlier work. Love here is a farce and an animal safety valve.In the first episode a medallion with a picture of the motheris stolen and used as currency for someone who wants to copulate with an obscene figure. In the second episode graves and corpses are desecrated, also that of a lover, to get gold for primary needs. In the third episode we see a Totò who moves in a Sicilian/Palestinian landscape like an old and tired figure of Christ, no longer able to do any miracles and laughed at by his own apostles. He is the double of Don Totò, an old arrogant Mafioso, and flits about among dwarfs and fallen angels in a desolate wilderness. He is punished in a typically Palermo way for his last miracle, bringing back a Mafioso Lazarus from the dead.
