Accattone! was the debut film of Pier Paolo Pasolini. It has rough edges, but is nevertheless very impressive for a first directorial effort.

Historical Background: Pier Paolo Pasolini's father was a career soldier and supporter of the Fascist regime. His mother, on the other hand, was a schoolteacher with a taste for poetry. Pasolini lived throughout his life with his mother and saw relatively little of his father, which was just as well, since he despised the man. Pasolini came relatively late to filmmaking. He had already made a name for himself through his poetry, novels, essays, and magazine articles, as well as his eccentric personality and life-style.

Pasolini described himself as a Marxist atheist homosexual. After World War II, Pasolini became a schoolteacher and joined the Italian Communist Party, but he was later expelled. He was suspended from his teaching position for publicly courting adolescent and young adult male prostitutes. Pasolini and his mother took refuge, in 1950, in the borgate, which was the sub-proletariat slum on the margin of the city of Rome. There, Pasolini moved freely through the world of pimps, prostitutes, and petty thieves. He was even arrested on more than one occasion. Pasolini drew on this experience in the ghetto for his first two novels, Ragazzi di vita (1955) and Una Vita Vilenta (1959). Those literary works then became the material for his first two films, Accattone! (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962).

By the time Pasolini turned to making Accattone!, he had already participated as a scriptwriter, in minor or major ways, on more than a dozen films by other directors. He was much in demand when it came to writing story elements or dialog having to do with the seedy side of life in Rome. He had contributed, for example, to Fellini's La Dolce Vita, as well as several films directed by Mauro Bolognini. Fellini initially expressed interest in producing Pasolini's debut directorial effort through his newly formed production company, Federiz, but backed out after reviewing two preliminary sequences from the film. Bolognini helped find Pasolini an alternative producer, Alfredo Bini, who went on to produce all of Pasolini's films up through Oedipus Rex (1967). A young poet and future director, Bernardo Bertolucci, acted as assistant director for Accattone!.

Accattone! was controversial in more ways than one. In Italy, the film created a scandal. It was condemned for treating amoral characters sympathetically and for "contaminating" the sacred with the profane. It was also interpreted as something of a renewal of neo-realism and the related social protests. It was far more the former than the latter. Pasolini's early films came on the heels of the neo-realism of De Sica and Rossellini and shared some of the methods of the neo-realists, including filming on location, use of non-professional actors, and a gritty documentary-like style. Yet, Accattone! is not fundamentally social commentary. It makes no plea on behalf of the destitute proletariat. In fact, it is far closer to a celebration of life in the borgate, as though that life were some kind of mythic primordial existence blessedly untainted by capitalist consumerism. Pasolini's cinematic vision was unique, reflecting his distinctive personality and beliefs. Though an atheist, Pasolini was highly "religious" in an existential sort of way. Though his filmmaking skills were technically deficient at the time he made Accattone!, by his own later admission, his sensitivity as a poet and eye for visual artistry were already fully developed. The result is a debut film of unusual artistic maturity despite uneven realization. Internationally, critics varied widely in their response to Accattone!

The Story: Vittorio Accatone (Franco Citti) is a pimp who lives off the earnings of his prostitute girlfriend, Maddalena (Silvana Corsini), until she has a cast placed on her leg and later gets beat up by some thugs. She refuses to identify the guilty parties at the police station and, instead, fingers some innocent lads. Maddalena gets a jail sentence for perjury and Vittorio ends up destitute, without his prostitute. Vittorio hangs out with a bunch of idle youth who equate working with having your blood sucked dry. They are so despondent that Accatone is willing to risk his life on a lark, swimming across the river after eating a big meal of potatoes, which had already caused the death of one of their associates.

Vittorio tries to scrounge food from his ex-wife, Ascenza (Paola Guidi), who he abandoned, along with his son. Iaio. Vittorio gets into a street brawl with one of her brothers, before being run off. Later, he returns and steals a religious medallion from his son to sell for food. He even cheats his friends out of their share of a spaghetti dinner that they had managed to cook up to ease their hunger. His luck improves when he meets a young virgin named Stella (Franca Pasut), seducing her and, later, turning her to prostitution. Vittorio briefly resolves to find an honest job and is able to do so with the help of his industrious younger brother. He lasts just one day before giving up because real work is tiring. Meanwhile, Maddalena, still in prison, has heard that Vittorio has moved on to another woman and doesn't take kindly to the news. She provides the police with information about his activities. An undercover policeman starts keeping an eye on Vittorio, just about the same time that Vittorio, desperate for some income, decides to join up with a small band of petty thieves. When the police close in on the group, Vittorio makes a run for it, stealing a motorcycle, but crashes during the getaway. He dies sprawled across the pavement like a crucifix, while one of the thieves makes an inverted cross sign.

Themes: The landscape of Accattone! is so amoral and relentlessly hopeless that it has sometimes been suggested that Pasolini's intention was to create a film from which no message could be derived and nothing learned. Accattone! is a poet's expression of hopelessness and despair, not a social activist's plea for political action. Certainly, Pasolini's vision is bleaker even than that of De Sica (Shoeshine or The Bicycle Thief) or Rossellini (Open City or Paisan). In Pasolini's view of the Borgate, the young men play death games and a child's only toys consist of pebbles and glass bottles.

On the other hand, Pasolini avoids any passionate condemnation of the bleak lives and environment he depicts, even when a prostitute is beaten by a group of thugs for mere entertainment, a man pimps out his girlfriend, a father steals a religious medal from the neck of his own destitute son, or when the same young punk cheats his hungry friends out of a share of a meal. Pasolini simply paints a dispassionately realistic picture, on top of which he superimposes a series of paradoxes, in the form of "contaminations." The first prostitute that we encounter is named "Maddalena," recalling Mary Magdalena, the prostitute turned follower of Jesus. We hear the strains of Bach's transcendently beautiful Brandenburg Concerti, while Maddalena is being brutally beaten by a group of lowlifes or when two men lock together like snakes in a fight. We observe Accattone and his friends glorifying idleness and belittling employment while suffering from hunger. There is little opportunity in the Borgate, but these lazy young men reject what little there is. We see tender moments of romance between a pimp and the woman who he will soon be prostituting for income. By Pasolini's reckoning, Capitalist consumerism and abject poverty are evils of similar proportions. We see the death of a young man who is only a pimp, thief, cheat, derelict-Dad. and parasite equated to the death of Jesus on the cross, between two thieves. This is the world as Pasolini perceives it. Pasolini sees grays where others see blacks and whites. Love merges with hate, the sacred with the profane, and conspicuous consumption with poverty, like so many swirls of ice cream. Just as Jesus saw God's handiwork in Mary Magdalena, Pasolini sees sacred mystery in a pimp, crucified by the social context in which he lives. We often praise directors for creating complex, multidimensional characters. Pasolini takes ambiguity a step further, creating both characters and themes that are gray, while, thematically, most films deal only in moral absolutes.

Although moral judgments can suffer as much from excesses of moral relativism as from moral absolutism, the latter was the primary problem in the Italy of the sixties, dominated as it was by the moral absolutism of the Catholic Church. Even today, the absolutism of the Catholic religion exacts a human price, as, for example, when Catholic parishioners are denied communion for wearing rainbow ribbons to express their support for gay members of their parish.

Production Values: The script of this film was written by Pasolini based on his own novel, Una Vita Violenta ("A Violent Life") (1959). The novel had been drawn partly from Pasolini's own life experiences, but for the film, Pasonlini converted the protagonist from a homosexual to a pimp, reducing its autobiographical context. Both the novel and the film are essays on the hopelessness of life in the ghettos of Rome. The portrait is uncompromisingly bleak and depressing, but surprisingly watchable nevertheless. Pasolini offers none of the glamour or sensationalism that would be inevitable had this same film been made in Hollywood.

Pasolini's visual style was so distinctive that it was initially attributed to incompetence. Accattone! comes across as a series of vignettes rather than a continuous narrative. Pasolini's approach to filmmaking resembled the frescoes that he once studied under the guidance of an eminent art historian while at the university in Bologna. Viewers are challenged to tie together the autonomous individual panels into a coherent whole. On the other hand, Pasolini's great strength as a visual stylist was that he treated each individual scene like a canvas that required perfect visual poetry. Every shot was meticulously composed, with great attention to framing, layering, and camera angles. The shooting on location added authenticity.

Pasolini used only non-professional actors for this film, though the lead actor, Franco Citti, made such an impression that he went on to a career in film and many additional film roles, including several in later Pasolini films: Mamma Roma (1962), Oedipus Rex (1967), and Arabian Nights (1974). Sylvana Corsini, who played Maddalena, returned for Mamma Roma, as well.

Bottom-Line: How young people turn out is dictated by a complex interaction of individual initiative and qualities on the one hand and social circumstances and opportunities on the other hand. Pasolini lets us see how the weaknesses of character in his ghetto youth interact with the hopelessness of the setting to produce indolence, exploitation, and casual violence. This is neither rightist nor leftist political orthodoxy – just the essence of reality, revealed through poetic insight. It's gripping material, even if not "entertaining" in the usual sense of the term. I recommend the film, despite its lack of refinement, compared with Pasolini's later efforts. Accattone! is in Italian with English subtitles and has a running time of 120 minutes.

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age