CHAPTER 10

NEOREALIST ART VS. OPERATIC ACTING IN PASOLINI’S MAMMA ROMA

Mamma Roma (1962) was the second film that Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) wrote and directed, but it did not receive its American premiere until 1995 for legal reasons (more on which later). Although this picture betrays the influence of Italian neorealism, like Pasolini’ s earlier Accattone (1961), it transcends neorealism even as it pays tribute to the movement. And, like this filmmaker’s subsequent work—I’m thinking particularly of The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966), and Teorema (1968)—Mamma Roma reveals a peculiar mixture of Marxism, Catholicism, and Freudian psychology. It also reveals Pasolini’s concern with that part of the working class known as the subproletariat, which for him includes pre-industrial peasants (still to be found, we should remember, in this post-industrial age) as well as non-industrial whores, thieves, bums, and pimps. Such marginal types are featured in all his films from Accattone (which means “beggar” or “scrounger”) to the Sadean Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), even in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969), which indict capitalism together with communism for the destruction of pre-industrial peasant culture and with it the peasantry’s mythic-mystic-mysterious response to life. The early Mamma Roma is of a piece, then, with the rest of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematic oeuvre—I write “cinematic” because he was a published poet and novelist as well as a filmmaker. But two of the things you won’t find in Mamma Roma, as you will in a number of Pasolini’s films, are a “quiet” script and a lot of understated acting, since Anna Magnani performs the titular role and the picture is about the cafoni who swell the population of Italy’s capital. Magnani played the heroine of another, more famous movie with Rome in its title—Robert Rossellini’s neorealist landmark Rome, Open City (1945)—and her character in Pasolini’s picture seems to be a resurrection of that heroine, albeit from a reverse angle, as well as a commentary on the often idealized portrayal of the lower classes in the socially critical, sometimes politically programmatic films of Italian neorealism. For Pina, the character played by Magnani in Rome, Open City, is an icon of proletarian strength who refuses to lower her moral standards in order to improve her economic standing, and who is pregnant when she’s callously murdered by the German Gestapo for sheltering a leader of the Italian Resistance. Mamma Roma, by contrast, is a prostitute with the petty ideal of social ascent from the subproletariat to the petite bourgeoisie, not Pina’s wartime ideal of a free and democratic Italy.

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And Mamma Roma is the unwed mother of a teenaged son who dies at the hands of the Italian police—the strong arm of the very nation that had itself suffered under the yoke of fascism—not the expecting victim of a foreign occupying force. Although she has a surname, Garofolo, Mamma Roma is never addressed by a personal name during the film; she is always identified by her public nickname, which comes to signify not only her dual status as mother and whore, but also the prostituted nature of a Rome, an Italy itself beset by petty, egoistic consumerism during the years of its so-called economic boom. Rome, città aperta, has thus become open in ways not envisioned by Rossellini when he filmed his emblem of Italian hope and faith, just as it has became anything but the città eterna in its losing battle with noise, pollution, and godlessness. The movie opens with the image of Mamma Roma shepherding three little pigs (wearing party hats) into the wedding reception of her former pimp, Carmine, and his bride, Clementina. Carmine sardonically refers to the pigs as Fratelli d’Italia (“Brothers of Italy”), which is the title of the national anthem and suggests the level to which Italians have been reduced by the greedy self-interest, the material opportunism, of the postwar period. Pasolini contradistinguishes his countrymen’s vulgar materialism not only by making all the celebrants of this holy marriage pimps, whores, and confidence-men, but also by grouping them around the banquet table in such a way that the scene—photographed at least twice in italicizing long shot— ironically resembles Da Vinci’s 1497 painting of The Last Supper. (Luis Buñuel used the same shot during the orgy of drunken, diseased beggars in Viridiana [1961], although his intent was not to highlight the contrast between the life of the flesh and the life of the spirit, but rather to ridicule and repudiate the latter.) Indeed, this reception is topped off by a parody of the “Hallelujah Chorus” during which Mamma Roma and Carmine antiphonally sing, not praise to the Lord, but insults at each other, so happy are they to be ending their miserably symbiotic relationship of three years. Carmine will now settle down in the Guidonian countryside outside Rome with his new wife, to whom Mamma Roma jeeringly wishes as many sons as were borne by the wives of the Biblical Jacob; and from that same countryside Mamma Roma will retrieve her only son, the sixteen-year-old Ettore, whom she had abandoned as a little boy at a church orphanage, to begin a new life in Rome selling produce from a stall in the marketplace. That new life includes a new apartment in a suburban housing project, the view from which is dominated by the shining dome of a modern church—a dome that we see, or see through Mamma Roma’s eyes, seven times during the film, including the final shot. However, spiritual renewal is not the protagonist’s goal in Mamma Roma, despite the fact that she attends Mass and visits with her parish priest. Her real reason for going to church is to find a rich man’s daughter for Ettore or, failing that, to target a businessman who can be persuaded to give the boy a job. Mamma Roma had asked the local clergyman to get her son a position, but, upon learning that the passive, disaffected, even soporific Ettore has little or no education and no trade, this kindly man advised the youth’s mother either to send him to vocational school

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