An author and filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini forged a body of work that painted a bleak, uncompromised portrait of the human condition. His breakthrough picture, Mamma Roma, exemplified his worldview. With Mamma Roma, the auteur's sophomore effort, Pasolini addressed the false promise of Roman life through a stark examination of a subproletariat family's breakdown. The film opens with a harsh metaphor for the principal's state, as the image of swine eating and rooting in pig manure widens out to reveal a wedding party. From frame one, we are immediately steeped in one of European cinema's truest and most unforgiving portraits of broken, hungry lives. As the opening scene unfolds, the titular character – played by Anna Magnani - feeds the hogs and harasses the bride and groom, her brash mouth braying a laugh that functions more as a psychological salve than a genuine response to the world around her. She taunts the bride, asserting that the pigs are speaking to her and one has confessed to being a whore. Here the director establishes a foreboding symbol so overt it becomes subtle, as Mamma Roma herself is revealed to be a lady of the evening in the sequence that follows. And when the groom (Mamma Roma's former husband), bride, and Mamma Roma herself improvise musical wedding toasts with lyrics that become progressively harsher and more revealing, a powerful yet oblique metaphor for the grandiloquence of peasant suffering takes form. Thus, Pasolini establishes early on that the film will inhabit the world of the "hick" – the milieu of the starving - and the concept of the peasant's ill-fated pursuit of edification grows organically out of these opening scenes. When the next sequence begins, Mamma Roma reconnects with an estranged teenage son. Here, Pasolini establishes a sublime, melancholy image of institutional social stagnation as we are introduced to young Ettore (Ettore Garofalo) riding a carousel. The mundane nature of the carnival ride subtly reflects all of the characters' lack of mobility – they will inevitably return to where they began. The circular nature of despair is further explored through Mamma Roma's sojourns to "the track", a row for ladies of the evening where she previously moonlighted as a prostitute. The sequence features our protagonist taking a circular route around the row, conversing with the brethren she's self deluded enough to feel are beneath her. Her journey mirrors her trajectory throughout the film; she begins the story a beleaguered whore and, in spite of the most fervent of efforts, concludes the same. Thus, Pasolini effectively illustrates a theme consistent in his work: the inevitability of failure. It is the titular character's hidden self that, once revealed, completes Ettore's disillusionment. When introduced, he is a young tough content to roam the back streets with his equally aimless friends. The search for a "score" (another bit of foreshadowing as a score is what eventually leads to his institutionalization) supplants any real material pursuit. Yet Mamma Roma's false promise of a better life serves more to suffocate the young man than embolden him. This dichotomy is established when young Ettore is first taken to his mother's apartment. A strong undercurrent of sexual tension permeates the tango scene – a sequence in which Mamma Roma and Ettore dance to the ironically titled Italian folk song "Gypsy Violin." Her coquettish wiles and close, effusive body language reveal the incestuous nature of her affection, as well as Ettore's understandable sense of emotional suffocation. The incest motif is further underscored when Ettore becomes infatuated with a fickle young mother. Mamma Roma seeks to diffuse his affection by having a colleague seduce and deflower him. Here, Mamma Roma's yearnings crystallize as she literally assigns a surrogate to copulate with the young "pimp." Pasolini's use of incest can be viewed as clever and uncompromised, as it is both a symbol of circular entrapment and a metaphor for the manner in which desolate generations subjugate each other in the service of their needs. In this respect, sexuality bares the same weight as economic or emotional factors. Thus, in Mamma Roma, all needs are satisfied within the perverse symbiosis of dysfunction. The story concludes as a fait e' compli. After Mamma Roma's previous husband reappears (a plot point that symbolically underscores the impossibility of self-gentrification; the man is, literally, the past come back for a reckoning), young Ettore discovers his mother's past and embarks on another score. The target, a hospital for the aged previously alluded to in the story, constitutes Pasolini's most apocalyptic metaphor. The cold, pale walls and rows of old men filed away until they die reflect the state of the indigent that populate the story. The patients exist as Ettore is destined to. At the denouement, the young man lays strapped to a wooden table, a literal manifestation of his psychosocial imprisonment. Hence, the director has created a portrait of an impoverished class trapped in behavior patterns that are incestuous and self-hypnotizing. Mamma Roma constitutes a hopeless vision of humanity unequaled in the Pasolini cannon until his final film.
Review of Mamma Roma
