Accattone in Jazz.

Tonight at Lincoln Center, Accattone in Jazz: An Homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini brings an end to the much-overdue tribute to the filmmaker and poet. (I can still remember MoMA's great Pasolini retrospective 20 years ago.) It leaves you wondering where a film director with Pasolini's literary and artistic talents might be found today.

Pasolini's first film, set outside effortlessly dramatic Naples, is a sympathetic portrait of a small-time pimp, Accattone, whose heart is just a little too good to make him good at his job, although calling anything Accattone does a "job" would already be exaggerating. In a landscape, far from the center of anything, where the ruins of World War II stand alongside the ruins, rising out of the swamps, of housing projects under construction, local hoodlums kill time abusing each other and preying on any girls who happen to be around. Scorned by the family of his young wife, bullied by his unemployed peers, Accattone finally meets blonde Stella, a whore's daughter who might turn out to be more than that. Can fate be beaten? The toughs who gamble in the local cafes are betting on it.

All the neo-realist ingredients are here - like most serious artists, Pasolini knew the traditions he was emerging from - but Accattone is a stylistic step beyond, with a Neapolitan chorus of louts observing every misfortune mercilessly, reminding you that pain is a sadly reliable source of comedy, and with airs from Bach's St Matthew Passion playing as if Accattone were walking up Calvary - which, as Pasolini sees it, he is. The director's gilding the lily here. He won't convince you that this loser is divine, although you can sense that Pasolini found him divinely handsome. But convincing you he's human is itself an achievement.

Mama Roma opened the series, with the pro forma speeches by a slew of Italians from this or that institute. My favorite was one who spoke disparagingly about the ordeal of a mother trying to save her son from the life on the streets that would eventually kill him, and faulting the character for her petty bourgeois delusion of trying to lift her son above his class background. What would his mother think?

Anna Magnani is mockingly funny, poignant and vulnerable, infusing the classic story of a mother's sacrifices with the emotional rough-housing that you find in commedia dell-arte, which Pasolini would draw on again and again. Magnani gets all her laugh lines right, as if by instinct, and Pasolini's instincts, too, are right to keep the camera on her as she watches a scene and breaks into laughter, or simply cracks a sly irresistible smile. How much of that was improvised? A lot, I imagine, given the looseness of Pasolini's filmmaking, which got looser and looser over the years.

But this is Italy, and Magnani's motherly instincts win out. Where are the actresses like her now?

Posted by dwhudson at December 4, 2007 12:37 AM