Mamma Roma

"Mamma Roma"(1962) the second film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, is the brutally realistic in its depiction of life in the slums of Rome yet lyrical ode to mother's love. Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani), a middle-aged prostitute is ready to quit her profession and to start a new life with her teenage son who had spent his childhood in the country and does not know her well. She wants a better life for herself and a meaningful future for her son, and there is not much her Mamma Roma would not do for her son. Things don't go as planned, though...

Anna Magnani was renowned for her earthy, passionate, "woman-of-the-soil" roles and she is one of the main reasons to see the film. She is Rome's flesh and soul, its spirit and symbol, its loud laugh and bitter tears.

One of the early Pasolini, Mamma Roma is a forgotten gem of Italian cinema. Some pleasant surprises in this underrated movies, like the amazing performance of `mamma roma' -Anna Magnani , and the MUSIC, mostly classical!!! I can relate this movies with some work done by Vittorio de Sica , but is not so neo-realist, even though sometimes you feel like it is. Symbolism, a very dear approach of later Pasolini's work is present here as well, and we can even see this movie as a Greek tragedy, leaving the viewer's many options to explore. Overall, a well deserved 8.5/10.

Mama Roma, played by an amazing Anna Magnani, desperately wants a good, respectable life for her 17 year old son, played by Ettore Garafalo. She would do anything for him. If at one time she sold her body on the streets of Rome partly as an act of rebellion against a failed marriage of convenience, she now must resume the work to raise funds to pay off a threatening former pimp (played by the cool, charismatic Franco Citti), while raising a few extra lira to get her son a few nice things on the side. She implores a priest to help her son find a decent job and does a host of other things to try and get Ettore away from the life of a hood.

The problem is that her son is like she presumably was (and is still capable of being) -- a rebellious, angry child drawn to the street life. He also, almost instinctively, falls for a young whore who may or may not resemble his young mother.

This is a great film. Pasolini cares deeply for these characters. Are Ettore and his mother a Madonna and Christ as sometime prostitute and would be criminal? Perhaps. Though their sins are not necessary for their survival, their hardships and sufferings take on a religious, martyred quality. Mamma Roma is the lost, heroic sinner of the Italian lower classes who can sometimes struggle to better themselves through respectable work, faith and redemption. But she can't do enough for herself and her son by being virtuous, so she must turn to the street on occasion. And either due to his environment or his temperament, both products of his mother, Ettore, in all his youthful impatience and vigor, can't resist the effortless ennui and easy thrills of hanging out with petty hoods, stealing from whoever they can, and dallying around with a young whore.

Rome looks and feels like a prison in this film. The city feels walled off by apartment buildings, the entrance into which feels like the entrance into an ancient city -- perhaps ancient Jerusalem. Outside the modern buildings stand patches of ancient ruins. Ettore lives his life among these overlooked, neglected ruins, which perhaps foreshadow his own future. If this is to be his future it won't be because of a lack of love and effort on the part of Mama Roma; instead it will be because of the neglect of the prison of Rome, and because of his own wild, bitter heart; the heart of a boy for which Mama Roma would devote her life.

Just wanted to point out that in the final scenes, Pasolini shows Ettore in jail (for stealing), strapped to a table, and it's very much like Andrea Mantegna's painting, "The Dead Christ." This might say a lot about what Pasolini thought about Christ's crucifixion, and how we might view Mamma Roma the whore and her son Ettore (perhaps not as mother and son, but as Mary Magdalene and Christ?). This final scene also makes one recall how the opening scene, the marriage of Carmine (the pimp) and his bride, looks so much like DaVinci's painting, "The Last Supper"... and so the film opens with a visual reference to Christ the pimp before he dies, and ends with one of Christ the thief after he dies.

So many things about this film have elements of the story of Christ, only they're turned on their head. Ettore's relationship with the loose woman Bruna, his familiar dealing with moneylenders, his lazy and thieving followers, his lack of a trade, his stealing -- it's as if he's the opposite of Christ. And yet Ettore is blessed: he's rooted in nature (he grew up on a farm, he recognizes birds by their songs, acts spontaneously on his natural feelings of anger or lust) and he's set within a story that's essentially about the power of morality and redemption. Mamma Roma is a flawed woman but a good woman who's trying to do the right thing, to mend her ways. And Ettore is not so much an anti-Christ as he is a proto-Christ -- a pre-Christian figure. The film 'Mamma Roma' may have more to do with being a pagan story than a Christian one...

Mamma Roma, not released in the US until over thirty years after its original release in Italy, has the ingredients of melodrama but is not filmed exactly in the way that should conjure the usual aesthetic. It's filmed like in a trance much of the time, as its characters move along like they know what self-made hell they're in, and while it's not done in a semi-documentary way it doesn't exactly have the heightened sense of true urgency that a Rossellini film had either. The location sort of makes it in part a psychological crutch to live in; the buildings and even the rural decay as being symbolic (arguably) of Roma and Ettore's rock and a hard place situation as well as their torn relationship. But what's captured best is the passion of the characters- even if it's not exactly always well performed passion or expression- and the hardened melancholy directed by the musical score.

One of the best things Pasolini has going for him with his production is Anna Magnani as the title role. She's the kind of warm-hearted prostitute that's become a cliché in some films, but she passes cliché to make Mamma Roma a sublime array of what a hard-bitten woman of 43, who's been working the streets her whole life since hitting pubescence, and while she can have moments of tenderness and happiness and real abandon with odd hilarity (i.e. that wedding scene at the beginning), it's all very brief as if on a leash via pimp Carmine (Citti). Magnani is, to use a cliché, the heart and soul of the picture, or at least the best kind, as her intent for being compassionate for her son is undying, even when she scorns him for doing nothing with his life. There's a great scene where she and Biancofiore, a fellow prostitute, watch Ettore at a waiter job, and she breaks into tears for seemingly no reason, but there is a reason for how simple but effectively Pasolini shows Ettore being really innocent and pure at work, even child-like in his demeanor.

And if Ettore- played by an actor with the same name in his first movie role (not to be cruel but you can tell)- is sort of two-dimensional as an angry and dysfunctional and aimless youth, after women and money but with no direction at all- is an intriguing weak link, Pasolini and DP Tonino Delli-Colli's skills at filming everything is top-notch. In fact, I'd say even having only seen a few of Pasolini's movies to be a very important film for him as director. He has a care in filming what are conventional scenes like a wedding (via close-ups, naturally), and in church scenes, and even with a specific shot of Rome used more than once to establish, and with a beautiful ease in tracking shots along the streets and empty fields that is in fact poetic in tone. Best of all, as other critics have noted, are the night-time walking scenes, where Magnani walks along in front of the camera, the lights behind making it sort of ominous and evocative at once, with one man coming into talk and then leaving and then another woman or man coming in, as Magnani walks and talks like it's the most natural thing in the world. Simply put, they're some of the most beautiful moments in 60's Italian film.

As the film rolls along to the extraordinarily depressing ending, leading to a scene in a solitary prison cell with a character tied down to a bed with a horrible fever, the music also becomes a fascinating asset. It's hit and miss with how Pasolini utilizes Vivaldi in the film, sometimes with the soft and super sad notes being played in moments that aren't quite necessary (i.e. Ettore just idly strolling along by himself, it might be more effective without), while other times with a very cool power (i.e. the pimp walking down the road, almost in a Morricone mood). But in these final scenes the music splendidly complements the doomed nature of the mother and son, as whatever momentary hope is moot for what the environment has to offer, which is all the same over and over. It's a very good film, if not a great one, about characters unable to surpass the dregs and just annoyances of the society (for Roma the customers and pimp, for Ettore his gang of "friends"), and it should be considered a must-see for fans of Italian film. 8.5/10