★ 7 / 10
The eponymous creature (Franco Citti) is a bit
CinemaSerf
The eponymous creature (Franco Citti) is a bit of a malevolent sponge. Hs has deserted his wife and child so he can sit with his mates carousing and playing…
The eponymous creature (Franco Citti) is a bit of a malevolent sponge. Hs has deserted his wife and child so he can sit with his mates carousing and playing cards whilst he pimps out "Maddalena" (Silvana Corsini) and lives off her ill-gotten gains. He's quite content with this arrangement until she has an altercation with a Vesper and then finds herself rather unjustly locked up for a year. With his income dried up, he has to make some changes. He's ill equipped to get himself a job, and isn't really motivated either. Until, that is, he meets the wandering "Stella" (Franca Pasut). There are certain similarities between her and his incarcerated meal ticket, but she's no hooker nor anywhere near as green as he'd initially thought. He gradually starts to fall for her but can he sort himself out and jettison the worst elements of his past before she tells him to take a run and jump? Though it's hardly a jolly affair, I found this first of his movies to be one of Pasolini's merrier affairs that allows some humour to pepper a narrative of exploitation and manipulation. There's little doubt that the "Accattone" is a pretty odious man, but as the film moves along there's a sense that begins to creep in that he's not beyond redemption - and both the intimate photography and the engaging talent of the boyish Citti help bring that out slowly but surely. Pasut and Corsini both play well with parts that are gritty, earthy and devoid of anything that might really offer them any hope, and on the sidelines his young son "Iaio" (Danilo Alleva) often serves as the most of unlikely of anchors for his selfish father. There's always space for a comment on the place of the church in society, and here there's a distinct parody being drawn between sainthood and, well you decide... Hardly ever seen these days but well worth a couple of hours to see a Rome that Nero might well have been proud of.
Pasolini's Roma.
aliasanythingyouwant
Accattone is a Neo-Realist examination of slovenly irresponsibility, tastelessness and self-pity - you know, the fun stuff. Its principal characters, a group…
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.
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