Whether or not it's fair, Pier Paolo Pasolini is most remembered nowadays for the last film he ever directed: Salo, one of the Criterion Collection's most infamous and oft-cited titles, whenever the topic of most scandalous/repulsive/outrageous/polarizing movie is brought up. Until I sat down to watch Mamma Roma last week, Salo was the first impression that came to my mind whenever the name Pasolini was invoked, and the only film of his that I'd seen from start to finish as well. I know there are many cinephiles out there who have a more well-rounded view of the Italian auteur's work than I've been able to develop so far, but Salo's notoriety has clearly cast a big shadow - the images of brutality and degradation, combined with the 1st Edition DVDs scarcity (and absurdly high resale price tag) for several years and its subsequent reissue, first in DVD, then in Blu-ray, have kept Pasolini's final effort prominent in the consciousness of Criterion fans over the past few years. I doubt that Mamma Roma has had much success keeping up; aside from the lack of upgrade attention or the kind of overt filth and depravity that made Salo such an object of curiosity, I don't see much that would make this crossover blend of late Italian Neorealism and Pasolini's unique form of Marxist Catholic iconoclasm a real hot seller among Criterion's back catalogue.
I may be mistaken - perhaps I underestimate the draw of Anna Magnani, a truly great Italian actor who turns in her final Criterion Collection performance after making a considerable splash in Rome Open City, The Golden Coach and The Fugitive Kind. Or perhaps I'm still oblivious to the attraction that Pasolini continues to exert in contemporary cinema - whatever the accuracy of my own assessment turns out to be, I know that his career and oeuvre will get a significant boost in the next few weeks as his Trilogy of Life is about to be released and reacted to, with a new crop of viewers encountering Pasolini's earthy erotic vision, most of us for the first time.
So personally, I am happy to have the chronological focus of this blog force me back to the beginning of Pier Paolo Pasolini's career, even to the point that I will do my best to strike the long lingering aftertaste of Salo from my imagination so that he can speak to me unencumbered by my knowledge of how his career and life eventually ended. When Mamma Roma was released in 1962, Pasolini was just one of several creative voices emerging from Italy's postwar economic and cultural revival, a renowned poet and author who, like a couple of other writers-turned-directors I've been checking out lately (namely Samuel Fuller and Norman Mailer) saw film as a profitable and fertile new medium to explore.
His first film, Accatone (which from all accounts looks like it would be deserving of a Criterion release) earned Pasolini immediate acclaim, such that Anna Magnani took it upon herself to contact the director so that she could star in his next film. Though such maneuvering seems like so much routine showbiz nowadays, Pasolini himself seemed to think of her casting as a mistake on his part, going by comments he made in 1968, reprinted in the booklet that accompanies the Mamma Roma DVD. Building the film around her dominant performance and persona clearly goes against the tenets of Neorealism, which was in any case already in a fading, transitional phase, though still a good point of entry for Pasolini as he established his own voice and vision in the world of cinema. His objections revolve around what he regards as a betrayal of principles involving concepts like the petit bourgeois and "subproletariat," ideas that I'm sure convey legitimate substance upon closer analysis but don't speak all that meaningfully to me at first glance, so I will set aside the idea that Mamma Roma would have been a better film without Magnani, or with a Magnani more constrained to fulfill the kind of mandate that Pasolini's later films went on to rigorously enforce. I'll just take it as it is, and what it is, in my view, is an engaging but occasionally heavy-handed quest for redemption in the midst of life's failures, chaos and confusion.
Mamma Roma begins with a brief prelude, a wedding reception into which Magnani, as the titular character, barges in uninvited to "jokingly" humiliate her former pimp and his bride, a final reversal of the proverbial bitch slap in which she conveys both her relief and her contempt toward a man who exploited her sexuality for financial gain and abused the trust she had placed in him. She enters the reception hall, which looks like another reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper (viz. Viridiana), with a trio of swine on a leash, which she calls the new bride's in-laws and singles one of them out as a whore. She goes on to overwhelm the ceremony with her mockery and full-throated disparaging laugh, amusing the guests with her lack of discretion and boundless desire for attention. Thus we learn that Mamma Roma is a brash, uninhibited woman who's easily able to get noticed and provoke the cheers of others, particularly men who get their kicks from watching curvaceous women carry on so wildly, even though she simultaneously becomes an object of their scorn.
Mamma Roma's fateful combination of arrogance, determination, fearlessness and naivete makes her a powerful character, the kind of personality that exerts a ripple effect wherever she goes. After we conclude the opening scene, in which we see her interacting with her young son (around 4 or 5 years old, it seems), the narrative jumps ahead without explanation to the present day, when we see that the boy Ettore is now a teenager. He's been living under the care of unnamed guardians for many years, but is now returning to the custody of his mother. Roma is at last freed up from her occupation as a streetwalker, with enough money to her name that she can now make an honest living selling vegetables from a street cart in the open air market place on the outskirts of Rome. With a respectable occupation and her son living under her roof, Mamma Roma's longstanding aspirations for respectability seem to be on the verge of becoming real.
But a wrench is thrown into all that when Carmine, the jilted ex-pimp, ex-lover, shows up on her doorstep one day to push Roma back into her old ways. He needs money, and his leverage to get it from her is the usual "Stockholm syndrome" variety of allegiance to old abusers that victims often demonstrate. That, couple with the threat of corrupting Ettore with lurid tales and secrets that his mother has tried to shield him from for all these years. Roma's protective maternal urges kick in - by all means, Ettore must be spared this knowledge in order for him to avoid falling into the same traps that snared her in her youth - and she succumbs to Carmine's extortion scheme.
It's a perfect set-up for us to see Mamma Roma at her work, a classic philosopher-prostitute as she walks the pitch-black track of midnight Rome, a Socrates in stilettos equipped to take on all interrogators as they toss their varied come-ons and sly remarks her way. The long tracking shots, in which the camera pulls back continuously as Roma struts her stuff, are easily the most iconic and engaging sequences in the film.
With the baseline dilemma of Roma's desire to balance secrecy and intimacy with her son, the true love of her life, now drawn, Pasolini shifts our attention to Ettore's plight as he's forced to find his role in a new neighborhood. He quickly finds a group of guys with whom he runs the streets, and an object of attraction, Bruna, a young woman who seems to have followed a path similar to his mother's. Ettore himself is a displaced sullen sloucher, moderately handsome in a scrunch-faced, indolent way.
A non-actor that Pasolini drafted for the role strictly on account of appearances alone when the director saw him serving soup in a restaurant, Ettore Garafolo fits right into Pasolini's custom of seeking out just the right face to flesh out the scenes he envisioned. There are a lot of those moments, where the faces on-screen are arranged in such a way that they appear to be fulfilling some kind of visual fetish on Pasolini's part - hardly unique to him as a director, but a noticeable consistency that carries over into just about all of the clips I've seen of other films he's made.
The central pathos of Mamma Roma derives from watching Ettore slide inexorably into the same mess of moral compromise and dead end petty criminality that years earlier ensnared his mother, despite her best efforts and sincere desire to provide a better life for him. His infatuation with Bruna (pictured above), who's already given birth to an "illegitimate" son herself, is exactly the opposite of what Roma intends for her boy, but her only remedy to break the fixation is to hook him up with another, more cynical and emotionally detached prostitute so that his regard for women is sufficiently lowered to the point where he's no longer enthralled by mere sexual attraction. Of course this strategy completely disregards Bruna's hope that in Ettore, she might finally find a man who respects and appreciates her - but what does she matter, anyway?
Meanwhile, Roma propels herself further into the con games that she's mastered so well over the years, bilking a married man out of a wallet full of cash through a manipulative (and amusing) extortion scheme involving a pair of friends who effortlessly seduce him into a no-win situation. She uses the cash to indulge her son, doing what she can to make up for the lost years with happy moments in the here and now, but she instinctively understands the inadequacy of her plans, as she sees her son slip further away in his own world and recognizes the futility of resistance to the sad destiny that life has carved out for her. Roma wrestles with questions of faith in her dialogue with a priest, vacillating between the authority of traditional piety and the innate lessons impressed upon her heart by hard-earned experience. Throughout the final half of the film, at various points of ethical confusion, her (and our) gaze is directed into the very heart of Rome itself, as we see the dome of a church (suggesting St. Peter's Basilica, though it's not) rising about a skyline of apartment buildings that threaten to soon engulf the sacred site - though not yet.
The final crisis ensues when Ettore, suffering from a fever and a fatal bout of ennui, is arrested for a reckless deed of juvenile delinquency. His medical condition and belligerent non-compliance lead the authorities to restrain him via strapping him down to a mattress, a too-convenient pretext for Pasolini to re-enact a favorite Renaissance painting, Mantegna's The Lamentation of Christ.
The heavy-handedness of this and the film's final scenes are enough to sever the connection between Mamma Roma and some viewers - it's all just a bit too spot on to be digested uncritically - but the visuals are indeed striking and memorable, for those who easily enjoy them on their tragic, quasi-operatic merits or are at least willing to cut the young director a bit of slack. Still, the final shot, of Anna Magnani rushing to her deceased son's bedroom upon hearing the news of his sad demise, resonates with me. It's a passionate moment, as she begins to come to terms with the depths of her loss, a grief that had already been building during the years spent separated from her son, and now on the verge of its fullest consummation. Her impulse is to throw herself out the window and join her child in death, but she's held back by the hands of friends who provide a more kind-hearted restraint on her behalf, even as she's transfixed once again in her moment of crisis by the holy dome, rising like a firm rounded breast that feeds and nurtures all the children of Mamma Roma.
Next: Harakiri