Perhaps the closest that cinema has yet approached the province of Genet, [Portrait of Jason] is an incredible peeling away of a man's soul layer by layer—his defenses, his pretensions, his lies and, ultimately, his truths. The film is an attempt not so much to find the core of the man as to see the whole structure in its internal relationships, to see the man with all that jumbled baggage that one calls personality…. It is obviously a film of sociological and psychological relevance beyond its immediate subject, but it is entertaining as well, because Clarke has found in Jason the natural actor. (p. 27)