Mamma Roma (1962): marginalized, dispossessed in the shades of Pasolini’s noir-realism
A middle aged prostitute, Mamma Roma, attempts to free herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son yet finds herself over and over again drawn back into her history, trapped. Sold off at a young age and abandoned on her wedding day, Mamma Roma is forced into prostitution to survive. The movie begins at the middle, with hardly any mention of the past, yet the past keeps appearing in some ugly form or the other, creating ripples of conflicts between Mamma Roma and her son, Ettore.
Ettore has grown up with some of her mother’s relatives. His own journey in the movie stands out. He has been educated by his mother to have a certain petit bourgeois outlook, and is absolutely traumatized on discovering that this mother was a prostitute. Now Pasolini commented in one of his interviews that, by way of contrast, a boy brought up in a completely sub-proletarian world “(would have given) her a gold watch so that she would make love with him.”
Though Mamma Roma’s unabashed laughter completely enamored me, the subtextual reading of Ettore’s sexuality, his disaffection from reality surpassed everything. His sleepwalking (detachment) and illegality (thievery) point towards a metaphorical uplifting of the mask on Italy’s heterosexual face (refer to his cha cha cha dance with his mother linked with the two stereotypical gay men during one of Mamma Roma’s night walk).
Pasolini believed that cinema should not try to make sense but suspend it. His unflinching fascination with the dynamism of lower class characters is astounding. These characters are victims but not passive, they’re not without dignity and complexity. Measured rhythms, slow camera movements, frontal shots, and long close ups all create a stylised poetic universe, a universe that rejects the illusion of naturalism, the core of neo-realism, where the flow is isolated, broken in the sense of spatial and temporal continuity.
Obvious biblical allusions come and go to emphasize on the foreshadowing of death and a struggle to survive in the postwar Italy.
