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Rating: If the myth of Pasolini is often linked to the scandalous avant-gardism of his last years, the era of the Trilogy of Life, the great blockbusters re-adapted in a modernist and post-modernist context and ethic, of Salò, Pigsty, Theorem, and all the arduous legal battles against censorship and oblivion, the true starting point, the origin of an unprecedented creative journey, lies in the dark, gloomy, and desolate neo-realistic analysis of the post-war period. In fact, there would never have been the cine-socio-anthropological experiment of Theorem, the apocalyptic sadistic desecration of Salò, and erotic-amoral drive without a careful reflection on the value system of a society suddenly stripped of its ancient beliefs, torn by conflict, lost between God and the people, excluded from faith in a world of chiaroscuro devoid of any intermediate shades. Pasolini's neorealist approach is as simple as it is devoid of multiple interpretations: a subproletariat hungry for bread, money, and life, the misery of the rejected and condemned, politics faltering between the Cross and the hammer-and-sickle union, the slow disentanglement from the terror of the oppressive fascist regime, the incapacity of a state to provide for all, the squalor of the outskirts, ignorance, illiteracy, the culture of materialism, the desire to obtain the best on the black market of anti-bourgeoisie. From this were born Ragazzi di Vita, A Violent Life, The Dream of a Thing, stories of children and teenagers, favored subjects of the author, who try, in vain, to get by without too many pretenses and demands, living day by day, savoring everything reality can offer them, even resorting to theft, massacre, and opting for new forms of slavery.
Ragazzi di Vita, Pasolini’s first novel published in 1955, is a work that expresses a double rawness. To a narrative entirely written in Roman dialect (often completely incomprehensible and impenetrable) is added the sad story of a group of lower-proletariat boys, represented by Riccetto, abandoned by their parents and left to live the hard life of the street. The days of Riccetto and his friends are spent halfway between leisure (the usual baths in the dirty and polluted waters of the Tiber and Aniene), fencing, collecting and selling iron and other metal materials found in dumps, and some occasional thievery. In a seemingly orderly and rebuilt city after the War's disasters, the gang of adolescents grows and matures on the sordid streets of the suburbs, even being deliberately molested by the rich bourgeois pedophiles and pederasts who like to hide with their unconscious victims under bridges, railways, or by the riverbanks. The work concludes with the accidental death of Genesio, a daring little boy swallowed by the waters of the Aniene before the bewildered eyes of his companions.
Excellent testimony of a post-war rebirth not quite successful, Ragazzi di Vita shocks with the intensity of the events deliberately reduced to a banal "daily routine". The hard street life, sleeping outdoors away from family and home, petty crime, and the absence of any intervention from above are conceived by the author and the protagonists of his novel as the sublimation of normality and custom for an outcast or marginalized person, confined and secluded at the corners of society. Riccetto and his colleagues even refuse to detach from the street, considered as their true mother, the protector of an Evil actually already inherent in torn humanity. Pasolini’s Rome is then the bridge between past and future, the crucible of a well-being that is late in asserting itself and which, however, does not seem to be particularly loudly requested by the gang of kids. It takes little to make them happy: a few pennies earned from selling scrap iron, a slice of pizza by the slice, and some other Roman gastronomic delights, a "Namo" towards the river, the dark alleys, and the beach of Ostia, a football match, a sleep under the stars, a warm nighttime discussion with tramps, prostitutes, and nomads. And this is what softens the harshness and rawness of the novel, which keeps the protagonists alive and "relaxes" the reader.
Ragazzi di Vita was also the first of the burdensome disputes between a brilliant mind and the archaic Italian justice, too moderate to understand the frankness of the work and the genuineness of the narrative. Pasolini and the Courts would argue until the tragic death of the author, splitting a country between hypocrisy and truth: conflicts that would have been the aircraft carrier for a revolution of customs and thought still unfinished and inadequate, suffocated by the politics of dreams and the fake welfare of illusions, the enemies that our Pier Paolo could not definitively defeat.
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