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Rating: It is undeniable the close relationship between the early filmmaker Pasolini and the neorealist novelist alter ego. Accattone and Mamma Roma, debut and post-debut of one of the most fertile Italian minds of the last decade of the century, masterfully mirror the themes and atmospheres of Boys on the Street and A Violent Life: in a Rome still marked by the catastrophe of war, far from the prosperity and economic opulence so mocked by the proponents of the boom, guardians, streetwalkers, shady individuals, children and infants wandering among the ruins and the new public housing scattered in the greenery of the suburbs enjoy the meager attractions of shantytowns and bidonville, young people without school diplomas or learned trades engaged in idling, trafficking, and stealing. Although not boasting the effectiveness and scandal that spill from the pages of the novels, the duo Accattone-Mamma Roma extracts the most significant and incisive juices: on one side, a penniless outcast "pimp" who dies without having redeemed himself from the streets; on the other, a sweet, eccentric, and a bit wacky ex-prostitute mother who tries, without succeeding, to purify her newly found son from the sordid and ancestral legacy.
Setting aside the raw parable of cunning Vittorio "Accattone," let us delve into the tale with a bleak ending that is Mamma Roma. Mamma Roma, an extravagant, likable, and lively woman of the neighborhoods, reunites with her son Ettore after years, born from a husband who landed in jail without almost even seeing the altar, and strives by every means at her disposal to raise him in a morally refined, bourgeois-friendly, and educated environment and, above all, to hide from him the truth about her desolate profession. The sixteen-year-old, finding hospitality in a modest apartment in the Roman outskirts, immediately attaches himself to the "boys on the street" of the underclass and begins to manipulate his mother to win the favors of an opportunistic and seemingly innocent twenty-four-year-old girl. Noticing the teenager's tendency not to build a future by studying and learning a trade, Roma devises a plan to rescue him from the bad boys and typical adolescent "romances" by getting him hired as a waiter in a trattoria. The dreams of the former prostitute, now a fruit vendor, are, however, short-lived: forced by her old protector to go back to the streets, she is unable to shield her son from the terrible secret she had jealously concealed. Returning to a life of crime, Ettore, despite being gravely ill, attempts to rob a hospital patient and ends up in jail; in a feverish delirium, he is tied to a restraining bed where he will perish, consumed by remorse and pain, forgotten by all.
Suspended between the melancholic, the sweetened, and the dramatic, Mamma Roma is a work that touches and even shocks with an emotional approach wherein the touching and somewhat "bizarre" feeling of love and protection of a mother—which dominates much of the film and seems to herald a resolution, perhaps not immediate, of the thorny problems—tragically ends with the disappearance of the boy and the woman's despair. Mamma Roma, masterfully played by Anna Magnani, is a strong, tenacious, loud, eclectic, eccentric, powerful, and even "muscular" character, a former prostitute who in the Pasolinian universe stands apart, for instance, from the weakness or pitilessness of the women of the street in Accattone, where they draw a clear line between the defenseless and even insignificant woman and the lewd, emotionless prostitute. Rome, on the other hand, wears the dual garb of the sweetly mischievous, loving, and wild, "rustic" and refined, a sort of "double-sided" tunic easily interchangeable depending on the circumstances. In fact, if at the beginning we witness the comical roughness of the prostitute entertaining guests at the wedding of the one she considered her former protector, shortly before the credits roll, the same character, the semi-redeemed fruit vendor, falls into a vortex of despair that almost drives her to suicide. At the very end of the movie, the charisma of Roma as a shaker of crowds becomes evident: in the post-death delirium of her son, Mamma runs home and everyone follows her, almost like a star, a fallen star, which denotes a role even Accattone in the eponymous debut film could not boast.
Far from sacred and profane blockbusters, distant from the Trilogy of Life and the apocalyptic Salò, Mamma Roma is the second cornerstone of a cinematic career that in a handful of masterpieces has managed to marry spirituality and corporality, morality and matter, ethics and reality. From the ruins of the post-war to the profane nudity of Theorem, Medea, and The Flowers of the Thousand and One Nights, through the comedies of Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, Pasolini's is a filmography of life, of human existence in all its historical, religious, and ideological facets, a journey where Mamma Roma with her handbag and high heels may even have coffee with the peplum-wearing sorceress Medea.
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