Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.
Pasolini's second feature is a raw, Neorealist-inflected tragedy anchored by Anna Magnani's ferocious, career-defining performance as Mamma Roma. The cinematography, shot by Tonino Delli Colli, draws heavily on Renaissance painting—most famously in the Mantegna-like crucifixion of the son—giving the film a visual grandeur rare in contemporary Italian cinema. The plot itself is relatively schematic: a fallen woman's dreams of respectability crushed by fate and class, with the pimp as an almost mythological curse. It covers well-trodden Neorealist ground, though Pasolini infuses it with his own poetic and ideological charge. The ending is genuinely devastating and elevated by its iconographic framing, landing with the force of classical tragedy. Novelty is above average but not exceptional—Pasolini is already finding his singular voice, but this remains more indebted to De Sica and Rossellini than his later fully-realized work.