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MovieMail's Review
Anna Magnani turns in a mighty performance as a prostitute trying to bring her son up honest in Pasolini's earthy tale of the streets. Michael Brooke takes a look.
PPier Paolo Pasolini normally favoured unknowns over Oscar-winning international stars, but he made an exception for Anna Magnani after she proclaimed herself so impressed by his debut Accattone (1961) that she felt that she had to work with him. What's most remarkable about the resulting collaboration is that despite her torrential performance in the title role being of a kind that might well have overwhelmed a lesser director, it remains a Pasolini film through and through: it's remarkably assured for a second feature, with his distinctive film language now almost fully developed.
Magnani plays a former prostitute turned market stallholder who's desperate to keep her teenage son Ettore on the straight and narrow (even though her definition stretches to the extent of hiring a fellow hooker to lure him away from what she sees as an unsuitable girlfriend) and give him opportunities that she never had herself. But what kind of role model can she ultimately be, especially when her past catches up with her at a crucial moment in her son's emotional development?
In outline it sounds like crude and often sensationalised melodrama, but Pasolini's eye for telling sociological detail is as acute as it was in Accattone (whose star Franco Citti reappears here in the similar guise of an amoral pimp) and the novels about Roman street life that initially made his name in the 1950s. However, the quasi-religious treatment of the underclass anticipates The Gospel According to Matthew and lifts the film far above its ostensibly neo-realist roots. This is demonstrated in the wedding party set-piece that opens the film, with its compositional parody of the Last Supper, interpolated musical numbers and even a mini-invasion of pigs, while Mamma Roma's relationship with Ettore can't help but recall the Greek tragedy that Pasolini would later adapt in Oedipus Rex (1967).
The film ran into censorship difficulties in Italy, ostensibly because of the earthy language (much of it delivered via the frequently hilarious monologues with which Magnani sweeps all before her - her garrulous nocturnal perambulations are particularly memorable), but Pasolini was probably right to suspect wider political motives.
Anna Magnani plays the prostitute known as Mamma Roma in Pasolini's drama, which follows her as she longs to give up her trade and go straight.
After seeing off her pimp, she sets up a market stall and fetches her teenage son from the countryside. However, her idyll is shattered when her old pimp will not leave her alone and her son discovers the truth about his mother's past.
Pasolini invests his ordinary, work-worn characters with an almost religious grace in his film.
