AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Tim Kidner One of the main things I noticed about Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1962 film is how many similarities it has with Fellini's 'Nights of Cabiria', which was made five years earlier.Not least of all, the feisty Anna Magnani as the 40 something whore of the title, nick-named presumably after her reputation as the best working woman in the city. There's also the fact that she desperately wants to retire, set up a fruit and veg stall and finally, get to know her teenage son.Then, there's the modern, on 'the edge of town' high-rise flats and wasteland that borders flanks them. Many Italian directors of the day used such locations, presumably as they were easy to film on and probably didn't require the expense and red-tape of getting permission to film in the City centre. But, those landscapes show a universal sort of hinterland, between poverty and modernism and their ugly sparseness helps concentrate on the human figures we're watching.Giuletta Masina, as the protagonist Fellini's wife then, in comparison, also tries to retire but her romantic ideals go astray and she just heads for heartache, whilst Mamma Rosa wants to see the son that his father never saw and she feels guilty over her neglect of him and wants him to steer a course away from the way she has lived.Unfortunately, these ideals slip a little, her persistent pimp notwithstanding, as she relies more and more on using her rather dodgy contacts and past liaisons to achieve that. Sickly as a young child, Ettore (Ettore Garofolo) is, frankly not a handsome lad and when he gets to know a local girl who doesn't quite meet his mother's high ideals, she asks another much younger and prettier call-girl to introduce him to women for the first time, if you get my drift and of course she wants to get him a job....talk about a mother's love for a child being blind!Pasolini's approach is rather less dramatic and theatrical than Fellini's but is probably more consistent and it's more straightforward. You just have to love Mamma's offbeat approach to life, though not everybody does in the film, which is both amusing and entertaining. I understand that the cast were all amateur apart from Anna Magnani, as was common with films from the Italian neorealist movement and this makes it all the more natural and believable.I noticed that Pasolini employed some lovely steady camera shots, like with a Steadicam, slowly moving along streets, which gives a graceful fluidity, adding to an often poetic poise. However, the emotional buttons don't get pushed quite as hard or readily as with the Fellini comparison but it's still an enjoyable film, that certainly adds to the list of notable Italian films of the 50s and 60s.If you enjoy the straighter side of Fellini, such as La Dolce Vita, or any that depicts Rome in a contemporary way, then you'll enjoy this too. The 'Mr Bongo' release has a decent transfer with pretty good sound. A few subtitling spelling gremlins are just noticeable but never spoil the viewing pleasure.

MartinHafer I know that this is a very well respected film and there are a lot of people who loved it. However, as for me, it did little for me. Now I am NOT saying it's a bad film--I didn't particularly enjoy it. Much of this might just be because I have never understood the appeal for Anna Magnani. In the films of hers I have seen, she just seems very loud and coarse. To each his own.Mamma Roma (Magnani) is a middle-aged prostitute who has been scrimping and saving for years to afford to retire and bring her son (now 16) to come live with her. He'd apparently been raised for her by someone in the country. The problem is that despite her best intentions, it really is too late to make him into the gentleman she'd envisioned. He prefers to hang with low-lifes, steal and avoid work--proving the old saying "you can never go back". A very sad story, indeed.The best thing about the film is that it does NOT have clichés like some films about prostitutes. There is no magical happy ending and the life is tough and sad. I can applaud Pasolini for this. But life is awfully short and sometimes I wonder if my time would be better spent watching something a bit more enjoyable. This ISN'T to say I only want to see happy films--it's just that with little connection to the characters, I just never felt particularly drawn to finish the film once it began--something that is actually pretty rare for a film nut like myself.

garbaje1 An author and filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini forged a body of work that painted a bleak, uncompromised portrait of the human condition. His breakthrough picture, Mamma Roma, exemplified his worldview. With Mamma Roma, the auteur's sophomore effort, Pasolini addressed the false promise of Roman life through a stark examination of a subproletariat family's breakdown. The film opens with a harsh metaphor for the principal's state, as the image of swine eating and rooting in pig manure widens out to reveal a wedding party. From frame one, we are immediately steeped in one of European cinema's truest and most unforgiving portraits of broken, hungry lives. As the opening scene unfolds, the titular character – played by Anna Magnani - feeds the hogs and harasses the bride and groom, her brash mouth braying a laugh that functions more as a psychological salve than a genuine response to the world around her. She taunts the bride, asserting that the pigs are speaking to her and one has confessed to being a whore. Here the director establishes a foreboding symbol so overt it becomes subtle, as Mamma Roma herself is revealed to be a lady of the evening in the sequence that follows. And when the groom (Mamma Roma's former husband), bride, and Mamma Roma herself improvise musical wedding toasts with lyrics that become progressively harsher and more revealing, a powerful yet oblique metaphor for the grandiloquence of peasant suffering takes form. Thus, Pasolini establishes early on that the film will inhabit the world of the "hick" – the milieu of the starving - and the concept of the peasant's ill-fated pursuit of edification grows organically out of these opening scenes. When the next sequence begins, Mamma Roma reconnects with an estranged teenage son. Here, Pasolini establishes a sublime, melancholy image of institutional social stagnation as we are introduced to young Ettore (Ettore Garofalo) riding a carousel. The mundane nature of the carnival ride subtly reflects all of the characters' lack of mobility – they will inevitably return to where they began. The circular nature of despair is further explored through Mamma Roma's sojourns to "the track", a row for ladies of the evening where she previously moonlighted as a prostitute. The sequence features our protagonist taking a circular route around the row, conversing with the brethren she's self deluded enough to feel are beneath her. Her journey mirrors her trajectory throughout the film; she begins the story a beleaguered whore and, in spite of the most fervent of efforts, concludes the same. Thus, Pasolini effectively illustrates a theme consistent in his work: the inevitability of failure. It is the titular character's hidden self that, once revealed, completes Ettore's disillusionment. When introduced, he is a young tough content to roam the back streets with his equally aimless friends. The search for a "score" (another bit of foreshadowing as a score is what eventually leads to his institutionalization) supplants any real material pursuit. Yet Mamma Roma's false promise of a better life serves more to suffocate the young man than embolden him. This dichotomy is established when young Ettore is first taken to his mother's apartment. A strong undercurrent of sexual tension permeates the tango scene – a sequence in which Mamma Roma and Ettore dance to the ironically titled Italian folk song "Gypsy Violin." Her coquettish wiles and close, effusive body language reveal the incestuous nature of her affection, as well as Ettore's understandable sense of emotional suffocation. The incest motif is further underscored when Ettore becomes infatuated with a fickle young mother. Mamma Roma seeks to diffuse his affection by having a colleague seduce and deflower him. Here, Mamma Roma's yearnings crystallize as she literally assigns a surrogate to copulate with the young "pimp." Pasolini's use of incest can be viewed as clever and uncompromised, as it is both a symbol of circular entrapment and a metaphor for the manner in which desolate generations subjugate each other in the service of their needs. In this respect, sexuality bares the same weight as economic or emotional factors. Thus, in Mamma Roma, all needs are satisfied within the perverse symbiosis of dysfunction. The story concludes as a fait e' compli. After Mamma Roma's previous husband reappears (a plot point that symbolically underscores the impossibility of self-gentrification; the man is, literally, the past come back for a reckoning), young Ettore discovers his mother's past and embarks on another score. The target, a hospital for the aged previously alluded to in the story, constitutes Pasolini's most apocalyptic metaphor. The cold, pale walls and rows of old men filed away until they die reflect the state of the indigent that populate the story. The patients exist as Ettore is destined to. At the denouement, the young man lays strapped to a wooden table, a literal manifestation of his psychosocial imprisonment. Hence, the director has created a portrait of an impoverished class trapped in behavior patterns that are incestuous and self-hypnotizing. Mamma Roma constitutes a hopeless vision of humanity unequaled in the Pasolini cannon until his final film.

Galina "Mamma Roma"(1962) the second film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, is the brutally realistic in its depiction of life in the slums of Rome yet lyrical ode to mother's love. Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani), a middle-aged prostitute is ready to quit her profession and to start a new life with her teenage son who had spent his childhood in the country and does not know her well. She wants a better life for herself and a meaningful future for her son, and there is not much her Mamma Roma would not do for her son. Things don't go as planned, though...Anna Magnani was renowned for her earthy, passionate, "woman-of-the-soil" roles and she is one of the main reasons to see the film. She is Rome's flesh and soul, its spirit and symbol, its loud laugh and bitter tears.