Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first feature Accattone (1961) paints a grim portrait of life in the Roman slums: where poverty and desperate living conditions facilitate and normalize crime into an ongoing, perpetual structure of abuse and exploitation.

Accattone (Franco Citti) is a twentysomething pimp operating in the outskirts of Rome. He finds community with other young men who are also criminals (mostly thieves), and during the day they all hang around aimlessly at bars and cafes, mocking those who work legitimate jobs. Even within the circle of friends, though, Accattone is lesser; inside the criminal world, to steal still carries some degree of dignity, doing the labor oneself, while to pimp is dishonorable.

The women who enter Accattone’s orbit are initially intrigued by his charms, but later come to terms with what being in his life entails. His estranged wife Ascenza, and the children he had with her, live separately, and she wants nothing to do with him anymore. Maddalena, in his employ and in love with him, is forgotten once she’s in jail, for truthfully reporting a horrible attack committed to her. And Stella, an image of purity when they first meet, is groomed into prostitution herself shortly after.

An inescapable sense of hopelessness permeates through the entire slum community, a world from which there is no way out. For Accattone specifically, the topic of his death recurs throughout the film: he takes on a bet that he won’t drown swimming the Tevere after eating a huge meal, he jokes about what his tombstone will read, and even puts up with his friends jeering that he should go and kill himself. In a moment of desperation, having tried a day of hard manual labor, he shouts, “Either the world kills me or I kill it,” rejecting a system that, for him, has become unlivable.

Through the brutal landscape painted by Pasolini, the world is so hopeless and bleak that death is the only escape from the sense of captivity. This unbreaking tension is visually conveyed through two memorable long shots like bookends of Accattone’s women: one with him following Ascenza, begging her to take him back, and another of him with Stella, as he irrationally berates her actions, for giving into the prostitution role he set her up for. These lengthy shots are held constant, unblinking, forcing us to sit with the tension as he first pleads with his ex-wife, and later tears into his new girlfriend. The camera, our point of view, and these two women are each trapped on this long road ahead with Accattone.

As awful as he often is, through his personal treatment of women, and his structural role in their exploitation, he is not without sympathy either. When seeing his estranged wife and children, he is genuinely disappointed with how life turned out, and his absent relationship with his son Iaio. As he says goodbye to Iaio, in an act of desperation, he gently removes the gold chain from his son’s neck, needing money for food. Through Franco Citti’s complex performance, of an often hot-headed, brash young man, in this moment he looks sick with himself and how low he’s become.

If anything, the complicated picture of life in the slums, and of Accattone as our “protagonist,” even challenges the typical narrative structure, with a void of redemption and no real journey of growth. Accattone is an antihero, in maybe the most “anti” sense of the term, but grappling with his surroundings, and the lack of support structure around him, how else could he have turned out? Finding happiness, success, love, all fall secondary to the primal, desperate, need for basic survival, even if that equates to a life of isolation and prolonging the inevitable doom.