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.

After many years working in the streets of Roma, the middle-age whore Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani) saves money to buy an upper class apartment, a fruit stand and retires from the prostitution. She brings her teenage son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo), who was raised alone in the country, to live with her, and Ettore becomes her pride and joy. However, the boy that does not want to study or work, joins to idle friends, has a crush on a bitch, and Mamma Roma uses her best but limited efforts to straight Ettore and make him an honest man. However, her past haunts her with tragic consequences.

"Mamma Roma", the second movie of Pier Paolo Pasolini, is an impressive, cruel, touching, riveting realistic drama. Anna Magnani has an awesome performance in the role of a limited mother trying to live an honest life and give the best for her son. Franco Citti has a short, but also fantastic acting in the role of a nasty pimp. In times when Hollywoodian fairytale world prevails in most worldwide movie theaters and rentals, it is good to revisit the real world in this unforgettable gem. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Mamma Roma"

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

Mamma Roma could be Pasolini's best film. Well, perhaps I shouldn't judge that right now. I have seen two others, Salo, which I quite like despite its being the vilest film ever made, and The Gospel According to Matthew, generally considered his best film. I love that one, as well. But, as much as I loved those two films, they didn't envelope me like Mamma Roma did.

Anna Magnani plays the titular character, an aging, plump, and earthy whore. Her pimp has retired and let her go, so Mamma Ro' runs off to the country to gather up her teenage son. The backstory of the son is left obscure. Apparently Mamma Ro' left him with some relatives or something like that. Her son, Ettore, is excited to move to Rome, but he is not sure whether he trusts his mother. She has abandoned him for most of his life presumably (one of the great gifts that Pasolini has in this film is that he never spells anything out, but just suggests and implies a lot).

The film shifts between Mamma Ro' and Ettore. Ro' is running a respectable fruit stand, although she likes to hang around all of her friends who are still prostitutes and pimps. Probably the most memorable shot of the film occurs when Ro' walks down the streets of rural Rome at night. The camera moves backwards on a dolly, and Ro' is constantly walking towards it. Her friends approach her, talk with her and walk with her a while, only to drop back. A few seconds later, a new companion will walk up next to Ro' and walk beside her, talk with her. There are actually two scenes with this shockingly beautiful technique, used at strategic points of the film. Mamma Roma cares about her son more than anything. She is a good mother, or at least she is overly determined to be one.

Ettore, on the other hand, lives a life of boredom. School does not interest him, nor does work. He would rather hang around with all the local hoodlums and the local tramp who lives down the street. He wanders around amongst the ruins of ancient Roman city walls. The landscape is simply beautiful, but in a very desolate manner. As the film progresses, Ettore grows more and more delinquent.

The themes of mother and son are universal. Of making amends and of growing up. This film captures the feel of human existence as almost no other film does. Pasolini is a genius, he has his fingers right on the pulse of human rhythm. I think that he captures what the neorealist directors were always after. They always got bogged down in melodrama, although I do love a ton of them. Mamma Roma is the kind of film that makes me happy to be alive. It's not exactly a happy film, but it is wonderfully life affirming. When Mamma Ro' rode proudly down the street on the back of her son's motorbike, it left a mark on me never to be erased.

As my first Pasolini film, Mamma Roma is as good an introduction as I could have wished. The plot is terrific and heartbreaking, and the depth and range that Mamma Roma's character calls for is delivered in full by Magnani. One must only consider the two separate occasions we see Mamma walk the line after dark. What a force! Her figure attracts so many men, almost like a light in an otherwise dark night would attract insects. But none of these men can keep up with her--the past she recounts, although lightheartedly, is too troublesome a road for anyone to walk down. Indeed, she herself never finds an escape from it.

And this is the genius of Pasolini's film. That we have the two figures of Ettore and Mamma Roma, who each emerge in the film at the hour of their seeming liberation-- Mamma freed from her pimp and Ettore from his "hicks" in the country--who nonetheless crumble under the weight of history. All they are left to do is wonder, to paraphrase Ettore during the end, "why so many people are torturing (them)," when all they (Mamma Roma and Ettore) want to do is good. Existential despair that resonates today amidst grave financial uncertainty and uncertain class ascendancy.