(No, this blog has not, in fact, gone into permanent abeyance!)
ON THE SCREEN
Accatone, by Pier-Paolo Pasolini (1961). For the last several months, my movie-watching activities have mostly consisted of movies I'd seen before, and didn't want to, or didn't have the time to, write on. But
Accatone is so engrossing, in a weird way, I had to break away from my academic career for a while.
Like so many Italian films from the 50's and 60's, it's strongly influenced by the Neo-Realist school: star actors are shunned in favor of common men in many cases literally pulled off the street, and action is carried forward in a blunt highly unsentimental way. Like many of these films, the problems and difficulties associated with chronically impoverished communities of post-war Italy form an essential part of the narrative, often almost to the exclusion of other issues. (In this case, not just because Pasolini was a committed Communist, but because it's pretty easy to be blunt about issues like poverty. .. sybarites are harder to characterize.)
As for plot:
Accatone follows the life of the eponymous lead character, a pimp for Maddalena, his girlfriend-cum-prostitute, and spends most of his free time lounging around with his equally unemployed friends.
Maddalena is arrested for her activities, throwing Accatone into a financial and emotional crisis. After seeking relief from the Church, and then from the family of his children's mother, he meets a beautiful, innocent woman named Stella. As their romance flares, he cannot bring himself to reduce her to just another prostitute as he has all the other women he's loved, and starts working for the first time in his life, but fails. A climactic final scene leads to his tragic death.
The movie is thus not one about redemption so much as the difficulty in actually achieving redemption under trying circumstances. At times this is actually made more or less explicit, as when Accatone swears he'll regain his earlier good luck even if Christ himself is against it. Interspersed throughout the dialogue are long stretches of various pieces by Bach (mostly but not exclusively the
St. Matthew Passion -- again, an allusion to the redemptive process at work), which lend a beautifully heightened sense of tragedy to the film, forcing viewers to withdraw from the narrow details of the storyline and consider the story as a universal type of sorts: the struggles of the proletariat to make an honest living. In comparison to Pasolini's other later great movies,
Accatone has less of the rigidity of
The Gospel According to St. Matthew [1966] (which is, granted, more or less demanded by that story) and more cogency than
Hawks and Sparrows [1966].
It's a shame the DVD version has not been edited, it seems, virtually at all, to remove the greater parts of the effects of age. The film is very grainy, and it appears to have been sloppily transferred not from the original film, but from a VHS version, and sometimes you can actually see the "tape" skip as on VHS recorders. Because the movie is often shot outdoors in very bright and sunny landscapes, the white type-faced subtitling is frequently difficult to read unless close to the television. Here's hoping that the Criterion Collection will come out with a new improved version that removes these defects. Despite these problems, it's a wonderful film and should not be missed.
