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"One pimp dies, another is born," says the retiring magnaccia (Franco Citti) at his wedding reception, summarily noting the link to Accattone. Crashing the party with porcine menagerie and raucous songs, Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani) cackles with relief—she can finally leave behind two decades of streetwalking and move into middle-class respectability with her son (Ettore Garofolo). The city is itself undergoing awkward gentrification, featureless buildings rise in the distance while rocky ruins adorn scrubby fields. Mamma presides over the marketplace but the old life is never far off, she's at her most joyous wandering the demimonde like Cabiria, soliloquizing fiercely as friends and clients drift in and out of the festive nocturnal void. (Two reverse tracking shots frame the garrulous tragedienne against a hallucinatory galaxy of street lights.) Meanwhile, the teenage layabout falls for a mini-Mamma Roma (Silvana Corsini) and is bathed in maternal wrath. "At your age, the only woman you need is your mother!" Mater dolorosa, Mater monstruosa. A world at once mundane and monumental for Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Madonna and the Reaper both turn up as pendants worn by pimply youngsters and a card-playing loafer suddenly sings a Donizetti aria. Stella Dallas and Oedipus adjusted, Bellissima because it's Magnani, the anguish and grace of mothering and whoring. Salò's "Circle of Shit" is already cited during the boy's descent, arrested for petty theft and strapped to the prison rack until he's a Mantegna Cristo Morto. The heroine's vision of aspiration (church dome above cityscape) is oddly quoted in The Departed, Cassavetes provides a complete analysis in Love Streams. With Luisa Loiano, Paolo Volponi, Luciano Gonini, and Vittorio La Paglia. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |