Mamma Roma
Mamma Roma
NR | 18 January 1965 (USA)
Mamma Roma Trailers

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.

Reviews
Actuakers One of my all time favorites.
Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.
Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows
Bene Cumb I have always had ambivalent feelings towards Pasolini. On the one hand, I like twisted plots, thrill, unpredictable moments, versatile characters and the like, but he is too dallying, has many references to "old" issues and depicts awkward things artificially created, i.e. not based on true events or so. Mamma Roma has its moments, but, in general, it is not catchy, the past within is too schematic, and all male performances are mediocre; black-and-white did not let enjoying of landscapes and town milieu in full either. True, Anna Magnani as the leading actress is good, her voice and facial expressions included, but all in all, the film was just a sophisticated cinematography and a reasoning story about a former prostitute's challenges and opportunities.
msavard-161-206286 As my first Pasolini film, Mamma Roma is as good an introduction as I could have wished. The plot is terrific and heartbreaking, and the depth and range that Mamma Roma's character calls for is delivered in full by Magnani. One must only consider the two separate occasions we see Mamma walk the line after dark. What a force! Her figure attracts so many men, almost like a light in an otherwise dark night would attract insects. But none of these men can keep up with her--the past she recounts, although lightheartedly, is too troublesome a road for anyone to walk down. Indeed, she herself never finds an escape from it.And this is the genius of Pasolini's film. That we have the two figures of Ettore and Mamma Roma, who each emerge in the film at the hour of their seeming liberation-- Mamma freed from her pimp and Ettore from his "hicks" in the country--who nonetheless crumble under the weight of history. All they are left to do is wonder, to paraphrase Ettore during the end, "why so many people are torturing (them)," when all they (Mamma Roma and Ettore) want to do is good. Existential despair that resonates today amidst grave financial uncertainty and uncertain class ascendancy.
pretentious_handle It doesn't even have any machine guns in it. I like movies with machine guns, guns that go kaccka-kaccka-kaccka-pow! This pretentious, operatic Italian schlock makes me wish for a good, classy American film like Forrest Gump or The Shawshank Redemption or Braveheart. Roma is the virgin whore and Ettore is the eromenos Christ, that's all well and good, if you're a decadent gay like Pasolini was.On second thought, I love this movie, "Mamma mamma, I'm dying mama ... " It's transcendentally beautiful. You couldn't even make a movie like this today, it would burn up the screen, the movie theater complex, and consequently engulf the surrounding city and country side, and people would rather watch Jack Ass or The Shawshank Redemption besides. I take it to be emblematic of the decadence of our times that this didn't make IMDb's top 250.
timmy_501 Mamma Roma is the first film I've seen from controversial Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and it will probably be the last for quite a while. This film is very much in the Italian Neo-Realist tradition, something I found odd since most films from the movement were made several years earlier. As I watched the film, which was filled with unsympathetic low-life characters, I kept wondering what the point of it was or rather why Pasolini made it. I don't think that every film should necessarily be a work of art or a work of entertainment; in fact I think there are all sorts of different reasons a film can exist. I just couldn't think of a good one for this film.I can most definitely say that I didn't find this film to be at all entertaining or artistic. Actually, the only reason for this film I can think of is as a venue for Pasolini to spread his political message; his contempt for the bourgeois is quite obvious here. The film seems to be all about how society works against the lower class to keep them down. I don't necessarily object to a film having a political message but it needs something more to justify its existence. The only other thing I could find was some very cynical and depressing melodrama. There is also heavy handed religious imagery and parallelism between Mamma Roma's son and Christ but I fail to see how it adds anything to the film. For that matter, some of the content of the film itself seems to be working against what I took to be its political message.On a technical level, I was mostly unimpressed with Mamma Roma. The acting ranged from poor to above average and a lot of the cinematography looked very nice. At the same time, however, the editing was often quite abrupt and the film often felt disjointed as crucial plot points were mentioned instead of shown while less important events often were covered more thoroughly. Finally, I feel that I have to mention the distracting score which alternated between overbearing and not appropriate to the action.