ACCATTONE

Poet and painter turned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini courted controversy with his very first feature by using Catholic iconography and liturgical music to render a plaintive, brutally beautiful portrait of a shiftless Roman pimp and thief (then-nonprofessional Franco Citti, in a revelatory performance) whose life of petty crime turns increasingly desperate when the woman who supports him is imprisoned. Melding a hardscrabble neorealist milieu with classical influences, Pasolini offers a vision of underclass struggle as a kind of modern sainthood.

“Pasolini’s first film, 1961’s ACCATTONE, was the original HUSTLE & FLOW. As the story of a Roman pimp’s demise—one that articulated his sense of social and emotional deprivation—ACCATTONE created a humane precedent that continued well into the filmmaker’s career. ACCATTONE may also be seen as a post-neorealist where-are-they-now sequel to Vittorio De Sica’s iconic SHOESHINE, but Pasolini’s realistic grasp of human and social progress—with De Sica’s shoeshine boys growing up to be pimps, not good state cogs—was too much for the fascist powers-that-be, as was the director’s ballsy Christ-to-man correlations. In the film’s most significant scene, a homoerotic Pietà takes shape as Accattone weeps on his friend’s shoulder. Pasolini was not sentimental, but his sympathy for layabouts was an affront to capitalist Italian society, which relegated undesirables like Accattone to the periphery.” - Ed Gonzalez, Slant