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The poet as scrounger-pimp-saint, his life and death. "Long live us thieves, we always know where to go." Accattone "the cardboard man" (Franco Citti) in the Roman lower depths of filthy sidewalks and angelic statues. In the slums he soaks his own thick mythology, is reminded of shame by the wife he abandoned (Paola Guidi), and apologizes to his son with one hand while stealing from him with the other. Madonna (Adele Cambria) at home and Mary Magdalene (Silvana Corsini) in the streets, beaten up for kicks by young hoodlums with curiously ethereal voices. In this netherworld of exploitation and debasement, a fair muse (Franca Pasut) and a prophecy ("You won't even have your eyes to cry with"). Neo-realism in Pier Paolo Pasolini's first film is just a launching pad for a stylized assembly of the profane and the sacred, his terse panning shots evoke Cimabue and the Old Masters only to bend them. (The central image has the antihero wetting his face in the ocean, grinding it in the sand and offering it to the camera, a grinning fresco peppered with birdshot.) Icons everywhere: Famished mooks gather around a plate of spaghetti like the Last Supper, cemeteries and funerals are the stuff of reveries, the Pharaohs come up in conversation, as do Nero, Tosca and Buchenwald. The protagonist alternately resembles a parasitic apostle and a self-mortifying Brando lump, he mentions "providence" and like Belmondo in Breathless locates his crucifixion in the gutter. ("There's neither heaven nor hell," declares Pasolini, only Dante's purgatorio.) A sui generis cinematic language of intensely conflicting forces, rough and delicate and fully worthy of its Bach chorales, a virtual film school for Bertolucci, Parajanov, Ferrara, Van Sant. Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli. With Adriana Asti, Luciano Conti, Luciano Gonini, Renato Capogna, and Alfredo Leggi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |