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© 2014 by James Clark
It’s a wedding reception out in the sticks (somewhat like that wedding party in Fellini’s La Strada). But we notice its far heavier acidic content, as compared with the child-like food-fight at the table where Gelsomina and Zampano relax a bit before once again putting their show on the road. A local woman has staged a quite startling invasion in the course of sending a message to one and all, a touch of theatre with no qualms about upstaging the principals. The happy complement of her entrance involves one male pig and two females, decked out in appropriate headgear, and she gets things rolling with, “Here come the brothers!” (The bride is from a farm.) She can barely keep from falling over from delight in her indiscretion, as she moves the animals toward the bridal party, amidst appreciative laughter from the guests. She refers to one of her companions as “Regina, the Pervert…If you only knew what she does!” The father of the bride stands up to deliver a seemingly heartfelt paean to the value of farming life, only to have the lady with the pigs call him a “hick,” which gets the company going on the speechmaker’s being out on bail. Someone asks her, “Why don’t you sing for us, a song from the heart?” perhaps with regard to re-establishing the moment of romance. She declares, as if emphasizing that it is her passionate nature which has brought about the creepiness wafting over the event, “When I sing, I sing with joy!” But, in going on to tell everyone that, “If you knew the whole story, it would ruin this celebration,” this disruptive entity alludes to a life of conflict unsuited for mainstream gratifications. She fires off a musical statement particularly unflattering to Carmine, the groom, whom she obviously has known for a long time; and the bride stands up and sings (in the impromptu operatic-rap at which the whole party seems to excel), “You sing and act so happily, but your heart’s bursting with rage…” To which (and to the charge that she’s jealous, being no longer the groom’s lover) the center of attention patronizingly addresses her, O Flower of Shit…” The bride is a frumpy blob with missing teeth and the groom resembles a weasel; but the invited intruder is a smartly turned out, no longer young but not yet old woman, with the kind of broad-faced handsomeness bringing to mind a dark, punchy, 40-ish version of Monica Vitti, who was radioactive at the time. However, on second thought, we should mention now that our protagonist needs no buoying by resembling a celebrity. She’s embodied by super-formidable, Anna Magnani, one of the most richly explosive presences in the history of cinema.
General insults aside, she gets down to a husky ballad specifying the locale of her joy, somehow not quite of this world. “I’ve freed myself. I’m no longer his servant… [Here the pigs come to bear] No hard feelings. I’m free!” And then she laughs uncontrollably, sending a little frisson through the hall, where the dining table resembles that in Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco, “The Last Supper.” She plays with some of the children in attendance—making a moustache of a swatch of her dark hair (a faint reminder of [far more vulnerable] Gelsomina entertaining the children, particularly a slow boy, at the reception in that provincial backwater). Then she turns back to the newlyweds: “I hope you have lots of children, so you’ll be in God’s grace all your lives. I wish you all the happiness…” This euphoric and very engaging launch is a stunner in the context of Pasolini’s generally sallow communications. We’ve recently come through his Arabian Nights (1974) and its bell-bottoms miasma. So, what, we might ask, makes such a difference here? The inclusion of “The Last Supper” could, as usual, be allowing for a characteristically schizophrenic Marxist swipe at supposed corruption in the heart of religious culture while, at the same time, be maintaining saintliness (of some order) in the ways of the rural and unlettered poor. Having seen that first scene we don’t have to wait for explicit references from the protagonist (addressed by her fans as Mamma Roma) which reveal detachment from both jackpots, in order to be on notice that, unlike the quirky, important but dreary mechanism of Arabian Nights, no hybrid of the auteur’s hobby horses is going to win, place or show in the steeplechase we have on our hands here. This striking bit of self-immolation can be readily traced to an actress who, in Rome Open City (1945), by Roberto Rossellini (to which Mamma Roma is dedicated), fitted in nicely with a political, sentimental, neorealist study of victimhood, but had moved far beyond such platitudes and was ready for mature exploration. Pasolini, thinking to send forward a scenario containing his donnish and palpably dead-on-arrival morphology (in no way rising to the polyphonic considerations of von Trier’s Nymphomaniac), had put in the driver’s seat a protagonist who had (in the ensuing 17 years) become somewhat larger than life and certain to explode an idealistic package meant for small people. Unsurprisingly, the director and his star were at each other’s throat from beginning to end. (Pasolini, in damage-control mode, has been quoted as saying, if doing the film again, he’d still cast Magnani.)
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Needing a team-player with plucky optics to bring about a saga demonstrating a law against all bids for well-being along lines of urban, free-lance, profitable work, what Pasolini got was a performer who could only live with herself when portraying a freedom as dangerous as it is exciting. We’ve come upon Mamma Roma at a moment when her sense of freedom—so buoying that it leaves her almost delirious—can be put into motion as never before (she having fulfilled all obligations to Carmine within their sex trade association). Her plans for a new life with traction that could lead to heights of financial and social rewards have two significant phases: leaving the provincial coastal town where the action begins, in favor of the metropolis of Rome where she has arranged to maintain a vegetable stall in an outdoor market; and reassembling her link with her son, Ettore, an adolescent who had been living in the now unacceptable town, fairly near to her but under the auspices of a guardian, presumably financed by her late-night earnings. Cutting from the wedding—where she virtually holds court, being a guest at that ominous and ambitious table, but a guest with mobility far outstripping all the others—she is at an outdoor fair (childsplay in view of her outdoor destination) beholding her presumed bundle of joy—during the reception she had declared, “Children, they’re really something…”—sitting inert in a carriage seat on a carousel going round in circles. Right from that get-go, then, Pasolini’s embedding his baroque take on dynamics (perhaps the teen is gloomy in face of being removed from the healthy wilderness where he could drift at a portal where help is apt to magically materialize) has come as a slo-pitch for her own slashing and smashing mode of motion.
Mamma Roma’s, Ettore (Hector, recalling the greatest fighter for Troy in the Trojan War), is someone with little fight in him, a cute, shiftless slug who would be a speed bump for a mother looking to move ahead by channels muddied by his priorities—she comes to tell him at one point, “You won’t get ahead if you hang around with losers”; and at another point she warns, “We won’t get along if you turn into a comrade.” But for Magnani in the catbird seat, Ettore’s unsurprising shortfall cues a Mamma who is so much more than a Mamma, thereby endowing the action with implications the screenwriting could not have aimed for. On first beholding the gangling, scowling lump in that toddler’s ride, she is restrained, a bit anxious. On seeing no sign of him at a new revolution of the play station, she seeks him out, catches a glimpse of him shoplifting and says to herself, “Son of a bitch!” He catches up with some friends, likewise in Sunday best clothes, magnetized, thereby, by ancient ways; and she calls to him, “Don’t you have a kiss for your [newly minted] mother?” He doesn’t; and she says, “Damn it!” with growing misgiving but hardly with heartbreak. When he asks, “Why are you taking me to Rome?” her reply is more on the order of squelching a jerk than building something special, to wit, “To keep the Pope company!” She gets out of him that he’s dropped out of school (“I get by…”). Her candid approach to getting off on the right foot is more redolent of vetting a mortgage than an elicitation of mutual affection. (Clearly she has had nothing directly to do with him and so she’s taken on a virtual stranger—“How you’ve grown! I hardly recognize you. I’ve been waiting 16 years, and it hasn’t been easy!” “Did you think I’d stay the same?” is his riposte, unaware of its irony.) From out of this orientation, with more resemblance to warring picket sentries trading insults than to the promising beginning of family intimacy, Magnani’s enactment of a hapless overreacher makes pretty clear that he is more like a shard of her exuberance than a vital necessity. (Whereas Pasolini lived with his sainted mother till the day he died, Magnani never knew her father and when she was 3 she was taken from her mother and brought home by her impoverished maternal grandmother, then striking out from what could hardly be called a family when she was 14.) She tells Ettore at this commencement of uprooting him from beachcomber ways: “I didn’t have a child to turn him into a hick.”
Magnani was often referred to as “La Loupa” [She-Wolf], and before getting her and Ettore’s show on the road she is visited by that newlywed/weasel, “Carmine,” who could be referred to as “Singer.” His songster status here involves the threat of singing to Ettore about his mother’s workload during the years the boy was busily avoiding school and busily shoplifting. Carmine’s in-laws failing to follow through on a job they promised him, he decides that pimping on her energies until she earns 200,000 lire has become his next milestone. The protagonist, as written into the script, would of course cave in, being totally intent on domestic advantages. But La Loupa would imbue that shakedown with considerable suspense. It being for only “…ten days if you put your mind to it,” Mamma Roma plays along, not insomuch as the disruption is brief (her way of cherishing her freedom clearly stems from a hard-won coherence seriously obviating her former way of life), but rather that she would require an untroubled period to play along with Ettore’s not very promising kinetics, which is to say, we are here about attentiveness to mutual interactive contributions that could satisfy her wider range of freedom, however unsteadily perceived. While pinned down at the beach/port, she chafes at Ettore’s slurred speech, the local dialect, “like those hicks down there” (kids his age who play cards in the stairwell). Out of the blue (or, as portrayed, out of an instinct to share carnal equilibrium; and, as written, out of an instinct to express being cool), she induces him to dance with her to one of her tango records, and the optics are fascinating. So many commentators regard that moment as Oedipal disarray; and yet the virtual hopelessness of this, what amounts to, abduction of a not reliable stranger has to be seen as an important factor. Starting with the hardly seraglio-salient request, “Watch out for my corn,” she proceeds toward fun-with-a-purpose and notes—far more the talent scout than the doting mother—“What a stick you are!” (The amateur actor playing Ettore has in fact an old man’s stiffness and awkwardness of physical presence.) The reconnoitre goes rather well—“Do you like it?”/ “I sure do…”—and, true to the script’s being about trying to patch up an old and large gulf between them (open to various angles), she tells him that, as she has demonstrated, she would sing the song on the turntable while dancing with his father. (The coda of this episode, her seeing Ettore, unaware of her presence, practicing tango steps, covers the real point[s] of this movingly designed and performed vignette. Mamma Roma says, sotto voce, “How you like to dance, my son.”)
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But the thing about Ettore, which soon becomes abundantly apparent on their making good the traverse to Rome, is that he never sticks to anything very long. He soon drops out of school, again—“I’m already sick of it,” he tells a promiscuous young woman, Bruna, who is but one of many distractions and has become a laughing stock of the outer suburbs where they live, while in fact she exudes a poise and steadiness of purpose far exceeding his and works a stall close to Mamma Roma’s, noting, “She’s so beautiful. Her hair is still black,” a generosity that our protagonist cannot muster, saying, “She looks like a monkey…” He comes to hanging out with “losers” his mother hoped would be less prevalent in the big city. When his mother refuses to give him a whack of money (to buy a gold chain for Bruna), he steals and sells many of Mamma Roma’s records, including the tango number. In what amounts to a last ditch effort to right this segment of her renaissance by way of co-habiting with someone gainfully employed, the would-be eclectic approaches the priest at whose church she has become a parishioner, far less out of piety than as a networking hotbed. The priest does not subscribe to that form of social media, advising, instead, that the boy (and she) “start at zero” and find an honest money-making place wherever it appears. She is not reluctant to tell him, “I didn’t bring him into this world to be a laborer.” The holy man’s mantra, “Send him to school. Teach him a trade,” fails to coincide with her having been touched by the “Italian [post-War-economic] Miracle,” and its impetus toward entrepreneurial, heartfelt designing, architectonics. Therefore, Mamma Roma—and let’s recall that she is known by that rubric years before (tentatively) tending to Ettore, during her first (abortive) involvement with entrepreneurial excitement including dreams of shifting her activities to Rome—reaches back to her previous way of making waves to position her now virtually hopeless (at least as Magnani plays it) associate in a cool hub where networking could overcome lack of distinguished spirit and wit. She zeroes in on a leading restaurateur (and fellow-parishioner) along lines of paying a friend and former colleague in the sex industry, namely, Biancofiore, to, first of all, seduce the church-goer and, then, be interrupted by her “husband” (Biancofiore’s pimp) and blackmailed into acceding to Ettore’s becoming a waiter at his carefully crafted concern. The bite of the social arena where Mamma Roma had hoped to spread her wings –“It’s a different world here…” she tells Ettore as they approach their new home—is underlined by the rural pimp recognizing the devout, big city mover to have been the pimp of “Big Tooth Maria.”
Still undeterred, Mamma Roma goes on to relish her son’s seemingly having a natural swagger when serving tables in the happening square which the establishment takes over. His coordination and conviviality are a surprising change of pace, a study, in fact, of how close (and how slippery) getting real can be. In the lead-up to this dynamic promise, she buys him a motorcycle. “Come and see the sun,” she urges him, to get him out of bed. During this light-hearted moment she dreams on: “Soon you’ll be driving a car and you’ll take me for a drive!” Here the protagonist, in the midst of her troubled hopes, falls within the screenplay’s motive to demonize consumer vigor. But Magnani—hanging on to Ettore’s waist as the bike races ahead of other vehicles and yelling out, to those being surpassed, “Jerks!”—squashes the mousetrap in the course of reasserting her own priorities as La Loupa. She had also enlisted Biancofiore to take Ettore to bed, the point being, “Next time he sees her [Bruna] he’ll spit in her face!” But, when all the schemes are well-completed—he wanting to take Biancofiore to the zoo on Sunday “to see the elephants”—the lump she’d invested in soon quits his job, returns to the feeble drifting and petty crime he can’t do without, gets entangled with Carmine coming back for more, gets arrested for attempting to make off with the radio belonging to a hospital patient played by the same actor who gets ripped off in Bicycle Thieves, gets deliriously ill, gets strapped to a bed and dies as seen from a perspective recalling Mantegna’s “Lamentation over the Dead Christ.”
The special work we’re put through, by this vastly divided film, concerns where all that chaos and desperation leaves a protagonist who could very easily be mistaken for a simple, easily readable, grief-stricken “Mamma.” On completing her first farewell tour (the 200,000 lire sprint) as prompted by the deadly Carmine, she strides in semi-darkness along the hookers’ track, triumphant and full of witty observation. “So long, Dolls, she salutes her colleagues. She tells a soldier, who materializes from out of the darkness, “I’m not hustling;” and when he replies, “About time,” she laughs uproariously. Then she tells him—after declaring, “I like you”—“In all my years here, nobody ever knew who I was.” Though she goes on to tell the soldier about being married, at 14, to an old (70) fascist friend of Mussolini, allowed to indulge in graft as a developer, and that is Pasolini’s tightening the noose on the character’s range of sensibility, the way Magnani, ebullient as only she could be, short-circuits that pap in turning it into her veering away from her real mysteriousness (abetted by the nocturnal cinematography) represents her variegated stellar contribution to inducing from the morose Pasolini—She could have been assailing him , on the occasion of one of those fights with him, in terms of, “What a stick you are!”—an upgrade of his terminally prudent and abashed brush with primordiality. In the scene following that, now at a church service in Rome, she whispers to her (alien) son, “It’s a different world here.” And though she attempts to throw herself from her kitchen window (in the aftermath of that weirdly supplemented death) and her manner is one of seemingly total devastation, if you’ve been following her closely you won’t buy into that for a moment, but instead will take seriously her sense of “different world” (as including the craft/design “miracles” far more vitally representative of real Italian modern history than the loopy fantasy our academic antiquarian wants to install).
Magnani’s performance, for all its rebellion (and the DVD Supplement gives us Pasolini loyalists [including Bernardo Bertolucci] in rabid denial of any depth at all coming from the actress [matching Bertolucci’s excising Fellini and Antonioni from an account of the history of modern cinema where we’re supposed to see Pasolini’s being the only incisive Italian filmmaker in sight, amidst Spaghetti Westerns and “Italian comedies”), instinctively coheres with a cinematographic strategy here light years beyond the writing. Pasolini (Bertolucci notwithstanding) put on notice to deliver, by La Dolce Vita (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962), sets up his cameras on those suburban Roman “wastelands” which—particularly in the sightlines of Antonioni—happen, for anyone with an alert design sense, to be cauldrons of gorgeous, quite miraculous spatiality. The scrubby fields adjacent to new, quite (architecturally) nondescript apartment buildings (but catching the light impressionistically) afford remarkable studies of composition, texture and light. There is a particularly memorable marshalling of these sensuous vintages near the outset of Ettore’s meandering while his mother hits the ground running in getting her outdoor vegetable stall (with glimpses of those fields) into satisfactory animation. On being teased by another salesperson nearby for her loudly calling out, “Buy my fava beans!” she shouts, “Hey, potato vendor! Let me shout! I’m happy!” Ettore has been excluded from his friends’ pillaging a local hospital and, as he stands in the fields wondering what to do with himself, a panning camera shot embraces the sunlight upon hills in the misty distance, the new structures in the near distance, the sandy pathways with their foliage nearby—and, there also, stone ruins of ancient structures. With visual buoyancy in the air, Ettore chooses to flop down near a shaft of at-least-medieval formation, and he, too, seems somehow extinct, his dead weight, his inertia, being a visual affront to the encouragements going for nought. Barely able to keep his eyes open, he shambles over to a pillar and rests his head sideways upon its uppermost point, winding up like a Brancusi sculpture; or, perhaps, a gargoyle. He then clumps along the dusty path, accompanied by the classical musical composition, Concerto in D Minor (Largo), by Antonio Vivaldi, aptly sustaining the call to be alive to a part to play well. Encountering a few girls his age sitting in tall grasses, he flirts by passing behind the ruins and then extending his back and head backwards like a gargoyle without malice. We see, way off, a viaduct shattered by time. Bruna arrives, and he gives her a locket with a little cameo of the Virgin Mary. “I find it better than the skull” [she tried to cadge from one of the other guys the previous day], she tells him. “Death is horrible. Are you afraid of death?” (Such an earthy matter being very compatible with that countryside, we come to see with special force Ettore’s rootlessness in face of a task of coherence that, Pasolini would say, is impossible in such a hell-hole; but which Mamma Roma would say, happily, is doable by virtue of the vastly encouraging forces at their present address.) Ettore brags, “No [I’m not afraid]. When I was a kid I almost died a few times, from pneumonia…” [a bid to turn the blame on the environment?]. On a walk, along what was perhaps a canal bed, now drained for development, he charms her with knowing the names of the insects and birds they hear. And the culmination of this ragged idyll has them entering an abandoned garage—in flight, sort of; but not very playable due to those who shun the darkness of that track where Mamma Roma caught sight of her “happiness.”
In a follow-up incident to that day of spurious promise, Ettore tells Bruna about his dispensing with school (and thereby shutting a major approach to a beckoning cool easily glimpsed but seldom seen). “What’s the use? I don’t understand a thing…It’s boring [to him, struggle’s boring—RIP] and it gives me a headache…” Bruna—partly devious, partly consulting her ace-in-the-hole of robust affection—reminds him that this escapism is hard on his mom. “Your mother cries…” He, candidly settling into the abortiveness of the very late construction of domesticity (and its confusedly being a factor of diversification, far from all-absorbing), snaps back, “Don’t worry. I didn’t ask her to cry.” Bruna presses on, “But you love your mother, don’t you?” “What do I care about her?” is his first standpoint. Then he modifies it to, “I love her a little, though… I’d cry if she died…” [anticipating her tears about murderous traction, at the end]. The stunted, misdirected affection of that gesture speaks to the imminent crisis represented by Carmine (who addresses her—no longer rooted in her A-game, as she was, on the short-term [faux-comeback] track—“Hey scumbag…You ruined me [she should have got a big laugh out of that!] I didn’t even know women like you existed…” [very true, from the Magnani perspective]), its (from a sluggish sense of “family”) scandalously obtuse option of letting both hopeless pests get lost. The decisiveness of her disruption of Carmine’s wedding party includes a killer instinct concerning such figures, the subsequent cordiality, near the end of the event, notwithstanding. Back on the midnight track, with Biancofiore (a persona from the provincial past, now having become an inflected form of metrosexuality), she acknowledges her solitary besiegement. “How you end up is your own fault… This fog rusts your bones…” Fatigue and self-hatred take over (for a while); and she tells the younger and more easily buoyant woman (who cracks, “Have a drink! You’re not that young any more…”), “When Ettore was born he didn’t want to walk down this road” [infants get a pass; no one else does]. Responding in the only way to keep her Mojo intact, Biancofiore bids her adieu on that dynamic flood plain, alertly having in view the best way for her to continue, “…Who put all this garbage in your head?” In a thrilling thread of dramatic dialogue (casting an MRI-like vision tracing the recovery of her guts), Mamma Roma laughs—not a completely bitter laugh—and calls out, “A priest!” Her young friend tells her, “Do your soul-searching by yourself!” The reluctant sex-trader declares, “God, I’ve got an awful stomach ache…Like I ate my heart out…” She traces whole families of criminals going back many generations and wants to believe (fortunately, only for a short while), “If they’d had money, they’d have been good people…Whose fault is that? Who’s responsible? Explain to me why I’m a nobody!” And so it is that, Ettore’s death confirmed, after staging a histrionic breakdown at the food stall (paparazzi sniffing out one of their golden moments) and racing home through the streets with many anxious well-wishers in tow, she is restrained from throwing herself from that moderate height. And from that height her face hardens to a game-face and she glares at the dome of the church in the distance.
She had told Ettore, on his being en route to a questionable career of looting the hospital, “Stupid loafer without an ounce of brains. You don’t have a shred of pride! Irresponsible fool!” This would be the screenplay’s depiction of a weak protagonist duped into a bourgeois death trap. But—as with films as disparate as Kiss Me Deadly, The Misfits, Roman Holiday and Last Year at Marienbad—someone else on the set, someone getting no credit for having the balls to fire off some thrilling and hard truths, has rendered that scenario a true work of genius and a gift to those of us having more than stilted needs.
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