the evil you do
by
Douglas Messerli
Pier
Paolo Pasolini (writer and director) Mamma
Roma / 1962
While
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma was awarded
the International Critic’s Prize at the Venice Film Festival and received
Italy’s Silver Ribbon, the 1962 film was not well-received, with many critics
criticizing Anna Magnani’s over-the-top performance, and some audiences finding
the work immoral.
Seeing it the other day, however, almost
55 years after it was made, I found it, as Gary Indiana describes it in an
essay accompanying the Criterion release, “among Pasolini’s most audaciously
shaped and satisfying movies.” Over the years, it now appears less of a
neorealist “slice of life,” as it is a sort of contradictory statement about
the relationship of the Italian postwar world, where the rich and pious are
represented as frauds, while the poor and peasant aspirants to the bourgeoisie,
like Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani), are portrayed as Christian saints.
Pasolini, as we know, was an agnostic
Marxist, but still carried with him, in nearly all of his films, the Christian
ideology, which pushed his films into different directions than almost any other
filmmaker of his day. If his early work appears to be grounded in realism, it
is in fact related far more to the theatrical tradition, which is why Magnani
is so good in this role. While hardly anyone has much to say in the Rome of
Pasolini’s imagination (Mamma’s son, Ettore [Ettore Garofolo] being almost a
mute, and the others figures mumbling) Mamma is constantly shouting at the top
of her lungs, lecturing the various passersby in one long ongoing speech, as if
everyone in the world was her audience. She truly is the “mother of us all,”
using language itself to alter the society in which she is entrapped.
Even as the film begins, at a wedding
party where her former pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti) is marrying the young Bruna,
Mamma steals the show by bringing three dressed-up pigs to the affair,
symbolizing not only her own feelings about Carmine, but joyfully celebrating
the event. She is now free, is planning a new life, one which will take her
abandoned son Ettore from the country back to Rome where she plans to move into
a suburban neighborhood and run a vegetable stall to better provide for her him.
The problem, inevitably, is that the past
will not let go of her, as Carmine shows up
again a few days later, his marriage having
failed, to demand that she return to the streets. And although she is
determined to help Ettore find a job, her methods are those of a street person,
as she manipulates a local restaurant owner by hooking him up with one of her
street-walking friends. To shift Ettore interests away from a local woman with
a child, she arranges the same whore, Baincofiore (Luisa Loiano) to make love
to her son.
Even
Mamma becomes aware of how the past effects the present and the future, telling
Baincofiore “The evil you do is like a highway the innocent have to walk down.”
Her “innocent,” of course, is her son. Throughout
the film Pasolini shows
Ettore
as a kind shuffling, lumbering beast, despite his suit and tie, who aimlessly
sleepwalks through a life through which Mamma forcefully strides. Attempt to
teach him to dance the tango (one of the most beautiful scenes of the film)
results in her landing, as she puts it, on her butt. Ettore cannot succeed,
even in his job at the restaurant, because he is a brute with no ability to
think.Yet, it is these very brutes of peasant stock, whom the director most
desires loves; and it was just such a figure, a ragazzi picked up at a local bar,
who
eventually killed him. Pasolini clearly thought of these born-losers as being
as close to saintly as any humans on earth. If they are fools, they are fools
the way Erasmus spoke of Christ in The
Praise of Folly. Throughout the film, Ettore and his friends, mostly petty
thieves, are represented in poses and momentary tableau vivant as figures out of religious and classical art.
As internet film critic Jim Clark has
observed, many of the images of Ettore are alarmingly
reminiscent of Caravaggio paintings, particularly his Bacchus and Boy Bitten by a
Lizard; the last scenes of Ettore, imprisoned on a punishment bed (letto di contenzione), clearly references
to the death of Christ on a kind of horizontal cross.
And throughout Mamma Roma, despite her sufferings and inner despair, it is Mamma
who remains genuinely funny in a world of general bleakness, and it is only she
who almost endlessly laughs.
If these scenes can be tied to neorealism
I lack a perspective on the everyday. No, Mamma Roma’s world is a highly
artificed one, a world of make believe which protects her, for the most part,
from the terrible pain of those with whom she lives. Pasolini upended
Rossellini’s Open City by using the
same actress in a very different way. If she is a bit manic, one might argue
that she is the only character in Pasolini’s film who truly seems alive.
Los Angeles,
December 19, 2016
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