Mamma Roma (1962, Pier Paolo Pasolini) (Patreon)

43/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. Teorema excepted, Pasolini has never much appealed to me, and this early effort boasts a remarkable number of baffling decisions—some that make little or no sense, others that smack of sheer dramaturgical ineptitude. There are so many, in fact, that I'm gonna risk looking glib and just bullet-point them all:

• The film opens with a prologue set at a wedding, then leaps forward about 10 years. During the prologue, it's established via dialogue that Mamma Roma has just managed to free herself from Carmine the pimp; when next we see her, she's been separated from her now-teenage son, Ettore, for many years, and as far as I can tell we never learn why. In hindsight, the prologue's function isn't remotely clear. Why start the story there? Seems as if it's mostly to give Magnani an opportunity to be boisterous and sing. 

• Upset that Ettore has become attracted to what the film itself clearly perceives as a young woman of easy virtue (the scene in which she half-apologetically walks off with the bullies who've just kicked the shit out of Ettore when he tried to protect her from their advances is just grotesquely misogynistic), Mamma Roma arranges to have a former fellow sex worker, Biancofiore, take his virginity; somehow, we're told, this will make Ettore want to spit on the young woman of easy virtue the next time he sees her. The deflowering happens, but offscreen, and it has no apparent bearing on Ettore's attitude toward TYWoEV (about whom the movie kinda forgets until it needs her again, though see below) or indeed toward anything else. And it's not as if we don't spend lots of time with Ettore, who's effectively the film's secondary lead role. Yet Pasolini opts to just skip past this ostensibly crucial moment, telling us about it via an exchange between Mamma Roma and Biancofiore after the fact. 

• When Mamma Roma schemes to blackmail a restaurant owner into giving Ettore a job (again using Biancofiore), we do see this enacted...but only after first hearing about every step in great detail. There's a reason for the dissolve or fade to black that generally follows "So here's the plan..." 

• Mamma Roma asks Ettore whether he can ride a motorcycle. She then asks him whether he likes riding motorcycles. She then tells him to follow her outside and see the present she bought for him. I kid you not: Ettore is quite surprised to find that it's a motorcycle. Never saw that coming. (Pasolini was not quite a Farhadi-level screenwriter in my opinion.) 

• Similarly in that vein (as well as the inexplicable omission vein): We hear the boys early on discuss robbing hospital patients of their valuables, and someone makes a point of warning everyone to be careful—some patients only pretend to be asleep, ashamed of not having any visitors. Pasolini doesn't bother to show us these thefts, but literally an hour later he stages another discussion in which someone again warns the others that some patients only pretend to be asleep. Whereupon Ettore goes into the hospital and steals a radio from a sleeping patient. Or is he sleeping? (He is not sleeping.) I kinda want to conduct a séance in order to ask Pasolini's spirit why he felt the need to set this up so blatantly twice, the first time a full hour before it actually happens. 

• Maybe the weirdest example: Carmine shows up again late in the film and threatens to tell Ettore about Mamma Roma's past unless she returns to walking the street on his behalf. A few minutes later (in terms of screen time, that is), Ettore encounters TYWoEV—the first time we've seen them interact since he was deflowered by Biancofiore—and she asks why he's being so sullen toward her, is he still upset about what she told him about his mother? Another truly momentous moment that Pasolini inexplicably chose not to show at all, merely have somebody refer to afterward. I can absolutely conceive of a context in which that sort of strategic elision would be effective and even thrilling, but Mamma Roma, with its constant bursts of raw emotion, is decidedly not such a context.

Anyway, I could go on, but you get the idea. Even looking at the film more broadly, I'll note with frustration that it has the general shape and tenor of a tragedy (peppered with in-your-face Christian-art symbolism—Leonardo's Last Supper at the beginning, Mantegna's Dead Christ at the end) without any actual tragic element that I can discern. Whose fatal flaw are we lamenting here? Does Mamma Roma's desire to make a life for herself and her child selling vegetables in a Roman marketplace qualify as hubris? The final shot (to say nothing of the protagonist's name) suggests that Rome itself is to blame, so maybe there's an era- and region-specific condemnation that I'm missing. Never been a huge Magnani fan, either, I should note—she's a bit much for my taste. Only the two vaguely surreal nighttime walk-and-talks, with the actors enveloped in blackness punctuated by streetlamps and the occasional car headlight, really send me.