Mamma Roma Review

• 18th Apr 2011

Recently, arthouse distributors Mr Bongo have released several forgotten gems from well-known European directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luis Bunuel. The latest release is by one of my personal favourites, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and is called Mamma Roma. Pasolini was an intellectual and writer, as well as being one of the most controversial directors of his generation. This is his second feature, about the struggles of a group of social misfits in a poor quarter of Rome.

The film opens with a wedding where Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani), a middle-aged prostitute, is holding court at the marriage of her former pimp (Franco Citti). She wants out of the business in order to take care of her teenage son, buys a fruit and vegetable store and moves into a new neighbourhood where she hopes to begin a new life. However, when her son, Ettore (Ettore Garofolo) arrives he soon falls in with a group of bad local lads along with a girl his mother sees as the local tramp. She becomes completely overprotective of her lazy son, even going so far as to set him up with one of her former colleagues. When Ettore eventually discovers that his mother was a prostitute he goes even further off the rails.

Mamma Roma contains a typically enigmatic performance from Magnani who commands all those around her, even when she’s losing her mind. In Pasolini’s words, she was a difficult actress to control. She first came to prominence as the mother in Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 neo-Realist classic, Rome – Open City, in which she dies halfway through the film. Here she presents Mamma as a truly earthy character. Indeed that’s the one thing that all the characters in this film have in common; they don’t seem to have any recourse or connection with the wider society. In that sense both Ettore and Mamma Roma’s fall from grace are inevitable and Garofolo’s Ettore swaggers around as though he were sleepwalking towards disaster.

Pasolini, aided by regular cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli’s camerawork, captures the poor quarter perfectly, as well as the two most memorable and key scenes. In the first of these Mamma Roma is walking the streets towards the camera and delivers a monologue in one continuous shot while men around her cruise for prostitutes. The second, and most famous, scene of the film is one in which she’s riding on the back of the motorcycle she’s bought for Ettore from her earnings. Pasolini focuses much of his attention on the body and movement.

The scene at the end of the film, in which Ettore is strapped to a bed in a prison cell, is typical of Pasolini’s style and Ettore is set up as a dead Christ figure. There are many religious references within the mise-en-scene of his films and Pasolini described himself as a Communist Christian. He was also a homosexual and this aspect of his personal life permeated his films profoundly. At the film’s Rome premier he was assaulted by right wing fascists. He was also thrown out of the Communist Party for his sexuality and it’s thought that he was murdered by a rent boy, rumoured to have been set up by fascists in 1975.

Mamma Rosa is as powerful today and more than a good introduction to the director’s work. He uses the music of Bach and Vivaldi to powerful effect, and the balance of high-brow music and images of the waifs and strays of Italian society haunts the imagination, as it does in many of his films. Here the Oedipal relationship between mother and son and the stark lives of these Roman slackers will linger long in the imagination.

Chris Hick