Accattone (1961) - film review

In the slums outside Rome, a young man nicknamed Accattone passes the time with his friends, all of whom have no prospect or desire to find an honest job.  Having walked out on his wife and young son, Accattone makes a reasonable living by pimping his girlfriend Maddalena.  One day, Accatonne’s life suddenly changes when he meets an honest and pure girl, Stella.  Deeply in love with Stella, Accatonne finds them a place to live, starts to take an interest in personal hygiene, and gets a manual job. Accatonne’s new-found happiness proves to be short-lived, however, as the pressure to return to his former life of crime proves too great to resist...

Having established himself as one of Italy’s foremost writers in the 1950s, Pier Paolo Pasolini began his film-making career with Accattone, which he based on his novel “A Violent Life”.   As in many of his subsequent films, Accattone is semi-autobiographical, recounting Pasolini’s own experiences in the “little homelands”, the slum areas around the Italian capital.   The style and subject of this film were both radical and hugely controversial at the time – Pasolini’s sympathetic depiction of a cynical pimp being particularly hard for a mainly Catholic Italian audience to digest.

What is perhaps most striking about Accattone is the way in which it is filmed.  The location shooting and naturalistic performances (from a cast composed entirely of non-professional actors) suggest a neo-realist style.  However, the way in which many scenes are framed (reminiscent of Italian masterpieces of the Renaissance) and the extensive use of music from Bach give the film a strongly spiritual, almost religious, feel.  The combination of harsh images of very real human suffering and beautiful cinematography makes this a deeply poignant and intensely involving piece of cinema.

As in Pasolini’s subsequent film, Mamma Roma, the film graphically illustrates the hardship and ennui endured by young people living in the slum towns.  Both films also show how difficult it is to break out of a life of crime and prostitution and attempt to make a better life.  The central figures in many of Pasolini’s films are like flies hopelessly buffeting a window pane: they glimpse a better life but are powerless ever to reach it.

© James Travers 2002

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Accattone (beggar) is a pseudo neo-realistic film, directed by an intellectual who, with no professional actors, describes the life of a poor and unscrupulous pimp and his exploited women, his idler friends and enemies, in a Rome where buildings and miserable houses seem mute judges of the action. The very careful selection of shots, foreign to a documentary style, the premonitions appropriate to a tragedy, a pimp who knows what Buchenwald is and compares his only one day’s work with the work in the concentration camps, and the sophisticated dream of death with surrealistic touches at the end, place the film near to the avant-garde movies that Passolini was theoretically hostile to.
Adam Gai (Israel)

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