Accattone

Just to start with, Accattone was not filmed in Naples but in Rome. Someone might have brought to that understanding by some Neapolitans gangsters that appear at some point in the movie As for the "ruins" that scatter the landscape, they are mostly buildings that will soon replace the barracks such as the one in which Accattone lives, or the Acquedotto Felice, an ancient Roman aqueduct that runs close to Prenestina and Casilina, two Roman suburbs, that you can see in Mamma Roma as well. Franco Citti, the character of Accattone, perfectly embodies the roman lumpenproletariat of the time: idle, fatalistic and desperate. Pasolini met Franco's brother Sergio, a plasterer, hanging around Cinecittà in 1951. He introduced him to his brother Franco that became Pasolini's dialectical adviser for Accattone, Mamma Roma and his book "Ragazzi di vita"; his "living vocabulary" as he called him. Indeed, Pasolini interests for dialects and slangs (Roman is not really a dialect anymore but a slang) was not disappointed. The dialogues between the characters are full of fantasy: rude and in some way reminiscent of their peasant past. A must see if you're interested in Neorealism and in the "ways of the underworld lumpenproletariat". Someone connected this movie with Bunuel's "Los Olvidados". I definitely agree.

Accattone announces a director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, who is a haunting/haunted poet from his surroundings and realist, someone who wants to put his eye on the world without flinching on the details of how 'ordinary' (of the street) people speak and interact, how raw and uninhibited they can be, these being the guys on the streets who are vulgar and coarse at best and at worst are abusers of women. But at the same time what one comes away with is poetry in documentary form - it's another level of neo-realism, a little more like an urban story than a post-war treatise that still throbs with the importance of those in poverty. Anytime I hear the song Matthaus Passion I'll immediately contemplate those harsh images of Vittorio Accattone, being cast aside by his family for being a pimp, or that poor girl being beaten at night by that gang of men, which is something that elevates such hard scenes into art.

Vittorio Accattone is the main character- charming and attractive, and also a perpetual scoundrel who also is a total outcast. He has a wife and kid(s), but is estranged from them by choice - her choice most likely - and he finds himself in big trouble once his main prostitute, Maddalena, is sent to prison for a bad informing job. It's after this we see Accatone on his potential path to redemption when he meets a supremely sweet and average girl from out of town, Stella, who he may eye as a new girl on the street... or perhaps not, as his attachment to her grows more and stronger, in spite of what and who are around him every day and night in the dirty province.

He's someone we want to root for in being a better person, or, perhaps even, better at what he does. He's a tragic anti-hero in a New-Wave sort of sense, cool looking and aspiring to be modern and cool (and maybe he is, up to a point), but also poor and uneducated, so much so that being on the fringe and being called "PIMP!" is what he's been reduced to by default. The performance from Franco Citti is one thing that keeps the viewer locked in: he's so good here because he looks plucked right off the street by Pasolini, as would turn to be his method with choosing most of his 'actors' on camera. There's a reality to his interactions with his friends (so called) or his business associates. Some of their dialog and tones of speech aren't refined or look trained. At one point when Citti's Vittorio breaks down in tears- a sudden turn from a previous scene showing more attitude- is authentic, even as another actor could have possibly played it "better".

It is what Pasolini wants, and he gets it, much in the same way he also gets a view of this side of Rome in a way that hasn't been seen before up until this time. His DP Tonino Delli Colli shoots simply often, and sometimes not so much - there's complexity, say, to a tracking shot in front of Accatone talking to a girl who is on a bicycle, or when we see the horrorshow of the men taking Maddalena at night in the middle of nowhere, the only lights starkly coming from the car. The effect is nothing short of a slow-burn. While a few of the actors do fall a bit too flat, and some scenes come close to lagging around (the editing might be the most significant flaw here), the raw emotion and fire in the subject matter keeps things fascinating. You want to see what happens with this young guy, and it's his tragedy that gets us absorbed, even as the Bach music abstracts the sorrow, and agonizing poetry of the streets, and it's this that makes it a classic.

Only downside I must mention - if you live in the US, or happen to watch it on a DVD or online from Walter Bearer films, the print is just not very good. It's the sort where the white subtitles drop in and out of view depending on who's standing where in a frame. It's not totally detrimental, but some scenes become hard to follow due to the poor quality of the subtitles with the print. This, if for no other reason, demands the film receive the Criteron treatment.

Accattone is a relentless study of the suffering that accompanies poverty. Pasolini utilises the well worn techniques of the Italian neo-realist moment to represent the depressing and oppressive life of a pimp - Accattone (played by the astonishing Franco Citti) - in the slums of post-war Rome. His life is beleaguered by guilt and self-disgust; his occupation, which is ostensibly the exploitation of women, causes the titular character untold despair. Ultimately he is unable to rationalise his need to eat with the suffering he causes to the women who work for him; they are, after all, also his lovers. Yet, Pasolini is careful to maintain the humanity of his protagonist by representing his hopeless situation as equally a result of his own doings as that of the social environment. Pasolini's Accattone is a masterful debut which expertly calls into service the devices of the cinema to convey a depressing but also compassionate narrative. His style is equal parts poetry and melodrama; a tough combo for any director. Some moments of this film are as tragically lyrical as those to be found in a film by Robert Bresson or Roberto Rossellini. Accattone is a commendable combination of style and substance which will leave few viewers unaffected.

Accattone is a Neo-Realist examination of slovenly irresponsibility, tastelessness and self-pity - you know, the fun stuff. Its principal characters, a group of young upwardly-immobile Roman males, are almost uniformly repulsive, a lot of chest-baring half-savages whose idea of fun is luring a whore to a deserted spot and beating her to within an inch of her life. Its hero, Accattone, is played by one of the more unpleasant actors in the history of film, a fellow named Franco Citti, who manages to single-handedly set the entire nation of Italy back about two-hundred years. It is a film of almost relentless despair, depicting a Rome so desolate and squalid, so bereft of hope, that it seems almost medieval. In the hands of almost any director the movie would be unbearable - either unbearably sentimental or unbearably grim - but with Pasolini at the helm it is merely honest.

It isn't Pasolini's best film by a long way, but it may be the clearest example of what made the director so special - his ability to probe around the most revolting recesses of the human condition without seeming sensationalistic, exploitive or crass. It would be easy to go one of two directions with a character like Accattone, a lazy two-bit pimp with a son by a woman who wants nothing to do with him: the sentimental route or the grotesque. One could easily imagine De Sica, the soft-heart of Neo-Realism, turning Accattone into a sympathetic, misunderstood Everyman. And one could just as easily imagine Fellini, the most uptight director maybe in history, transforming the character into a universal symbol of societal decay. Pasolini, neither a sentimentalist nor a moralist, sees Accattone not as a sympathetic character nor as a symbol. The least judgmental director maybe ever, Pasolini conceives his characters entirely in terms of their outward behavior, and not in moral terms. He neither psycho-analyzes nor seeks to "understand" his characters. He simply presents them as they are, warts and all.

It was always the purpose of Neo-Realism to present life as it was lived, not life as it was imagined by screenwriters, directors and actors, and there are few more successful ventures in this regard than Accattone. The film's main triumph is in its atmosphere. The Roman days have never seemed so sun-bleached, so arid and oppressive; its nights never so mysterious, so full of inexpressible longing (not even in Henry James). The characters seem bound to this world in a palpable way, their faces (shot by expert cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli) mirroring the desolation, the hopelessness, the strangeness of their surroundings. The movie's physicality, as always with Pasolini, is striking. But pure physical vigor, pure atmosphere isn't enough. Where Pasolini comes up short is in assembling the parts of his film into something with real emotional breadth. His first feature shows him already on his way to being a master of the image, but also shows that he had a lot to learn about being a master of cinematic rhythm. The strange blend of primitivism and modernism is already there but the command is not. It's a film that works well in the moment but feels thin as a whole. It's a triumph of Neo-Realist technique but it only half-succeeds as a film.

Half-successful Pasolini is still better than the best most directors have to give. If you can portray a character as repulsive, as boorish and ego-maniacal as Accattone - a character with few if any redeeming features - for two hours without alienating your audience...well, chalk one up for the director who can do that. Especially one who manages the trick without resorting to sentimental contrivance or the kind of false significance people like Fellini always tried to drum up by filling their movies with obvious symbols, the sorts of things art-film zombies love because it gives them a chance to show their alleged smarts. Pasolini never flatters his audience but he never sneers at them either. He attempts to neither ingratiate himself with the public nor antagonize it in the manner of certain self-important avant-gardists. The best artists look for what interests them in a piece of material, not worrying whether their ideas, their approach, their style is accessible to the public at large, or critics, or scholars, or their grandmothers or anyone else. Accattone shows Pasolini on the road that would make him one of cinema's best directors - a road traveled by precisely one person, Pasolini himself.

This is still a masterpiece of a film you can not afford not to see if you like Pasolini. "Accattone" is the directorial debut of the Italian neo-realist, Pier Paolo Pasolini, but by a strange coincidence it ended up being the very last of all his movies that I saw. I had seen everything he ever did, including short films by the time I got to "Accatone" and still found it masterful.

Franco Citti stars as the title character, he is a handsome pimp in Rome's post-war lower depths, with an endearing face that speaks volumes of his street-wise upbringing in the slums. To those unaccustomed with Southern Italian culture the way he spends his days with the other local pimps, playing cards and being lazy may seem vile, but it is actually a well grounded tradition, as is also his support of the entire family of his imprisoned friend, Ciccio, who depend on him for survival. He is obviously a fellow mobster, and their code of honor is at stake when Accatone discovers that he is in prison as a result of his whore, Maddalena, played by Silvana Corsini, who denounced Ciccio to the authorities. Even though she is recovering from a broken leg, Accatone forces her to go on the streets, where she is used, beaten and abandoned by Accatone's pals after he tells them the story, then she is found by the police and arrested. Accattone nearly starves to death from the total lack of income, he even sells all his jewelry to get by. He tries to reunite with his wife, with whom he has fathered at least one child, but she sees through his seduction act and her virile, beautiful brother beats up Accatone in an intense erotically-charged scene that seems to simulate sexual assault as much as violence between the men.

After meeting the innocent and beautiful Stella, (Franca Pasut) he is smitten and tries to get a job, so he can support her and his family but he is not accustomed to hardship and has the lack of patience that is typical of spoilt types that have never been trained to work does not make the job last for very long.

Never have I seen a more humane, direct and simple depiction of the tragic life of these undesirables of society. Pasolini is a master painter narrating with a few gestures all their hardship and suffering. Even getting a plate of food in this world is a memorable accomplishment. We see the whole setting as a sideline of modern society's inability to function properly. The 'corrections' by the police seem to be the most unjust of all, and Pasolini presents this panorama of human failing as an allegory of human struggle and spiritual redemption.