When her pimp gets married, Mamma Roma decides to retire from the horizontal business and focus wholly on her one son, Ettore, who, without any education, grows up in the countryside. She brings him to Rome and enables him to enroll to a school with the money that she earned from prostitution. She buys an apartment in one of the better Roman neighborhoods and starts her new business as a green-grocer. However, Ettore feels lost in the big city to which he is not used and joins a gang of youngsters around the beautiful Bruna with whom he falls in love. Since he cannot bring up enough money to buy gifts for her, he starts to steal, even items from the household of his mother. When Mamma Roma gets wind from that, she takes him from the school and organizes him a job as waiter. At the same time, she tries to turn him away from Bruna by sending him to a former colleague of her. The misery is perfect when Mamma Roma's old pimp turns up again and demands from her to prostitute herself again, since otherwise he wants to tell her son that his mother is a whore. Desperately she goes back to her old profession in the evenings, but it does not help: Bruna tells Ettore everything. Here, his breakdown starts: he quits work and is from now on a professional street-robber. When he and his colleagues rob patients in a hospital, Ettore is caught in flagranti by the police and brought into a psychiatric clinic, where he dies.
The German psychiatrist and writer Dr. Oskar Panizza wrote, towards the end of the 19th century, a story, entitled "The 'Trinity' Inn". This very special inn in Southern Germany is hold by an old man who speaks Hebrew, a blond, thin asthmatic youth named "Christus" and his mother, a once good looking woman named Mary whose profession is that of a whore. A very similar familiar constellation appears in Panizza's "The Council of Love" which has been filmed by Werner Schroeter in 1982. It would be very interesting to know if Pasolini knew Panizza's work, since without any doubt (at least for people who know Pasolini's work), we find in the figures of Mamma Roma the Virgin Mary, in Ettore Christ, in Carmine the pimp St. Joseph and most probably in Bruna the character of Maria Magdalena (exactly this role the actress Bruna - Silvana Corsini had played one year before in Pasolini's "Accattone". What we therefore have in front of us is a wonderfully perverted Holy Family in the suburbs of Rome.
The German psychiatrist and writer Dr. Oskar Panizza wrote, towards the end of the 19th century, a story, entitled "The 'Trinity' Inn". This very special inn in Southern Germany is hold by an old man who speaks Hebrew, a blond, thin asthmatic youth named "Christus" and his mother, a once good looking woman named Mary whose profession is that of a whore. A very similar familiar constellation appears in Panizza's "The Council of Love" which has been filmed by Werner Schroeter in 1982. It would be very interesting to know if Pasolini knew Panizza's work, since without any doubt (at least for people who know Pasolini's work), we find in the figures of Mamma Roma the Virgin Mary, in Ettore Christ, in Carmine the pimp St. Joseph and most probably in Bruna the character of Maria Magdalena (exactly this role the actress Bruna - Silvana Corsini had played one year before in Pasolini's "Accattone". What we therefore have in front of us is a wonderfully perverted Holy Family in the suburbs of Rome.