The Catastrophe

In this final part the thread of the plot is dramatically heightened and events speed towards final epilogue. Despite Mamma Roma’s attempts to return to respectability, Carmine has forced her back onto the streets by threatening to reveal her son’s past. But even this compromise is useless: Ettore has learned from Bruna about his mother’s double life and has left his work at the restaurant to join once and for all the gang of boys on the street.

The theme of the impossibility of getting yourself off the streets is not simply a narrative element of filmic events, but seems to assume a metaphoric significance of the ‘oppressed’, in Pasolini’s vision, condemned to remain stuck where they are. The metaphysical and impersonal idea of the destiny which persecutes marginalised people, confining them more and more, in spite of their efforts, to a destiny of suffering and death, was covered dramatically and efficiently in the previous sequence. Mamma Roma, forced back onto the streets by Carmine’s threats, wants to affirm her past, not through sparkling and grotesque gestures, but by revealing the truth and the pain: ‘ And do you know why my husband, Ettore’s father, was a useless good-for-nothing? Because his mother was a little whore and his father a big thief, because his mother’s father was a hangman, and his father’s mother a beggar on the streets….all dying of hunger. If they had been given the chance they could all have been good people….Whose fault is that? Who bears the responsibility for that?…. you explain to me why I am a nobody and you are the King of Kings.’

In the opening images of this new sequence Ettore openly rejects his mother who desperately tries to pursue him as she sees him drawn into the gang .The mother gazes at the son at first with a regal look and then with a shambolic suggestive glance as the gang disappears. The relationship between Ettore and the gang recalls one of the central motifs of early Pasolini films. The gang is one of the strongest conditioning factors in shaping the fragile and immature personality of the young boy: the boys from the new metropolitan periphery form a kind of ‘pack’ which joins together the sense of emptiness and total inconsistency of intentions and goals with the cult of force and aggression aimed at the weakest ( see the scene in which Bruna is raped). It is these very characteristics which impose a kind of ‘fatal attraction’ on the protagonist.

Ether also breaks his links with Burn, who is blamed for having revealed the truth about his mother: in a very brief meeting with the girl Ether again rejects his mother: it is the third rejection, the third betrayal, which seems a reference to Peter’s triple betrayal in the gospel. The figure of Burn a positive and effective influence on the protagonist: Burn is a young teenage mother, labelled by the gang as ‘everybody’s girl; in realty from the first images the director surrounds her with the iconography of ‘the people’s Madonna’. She is a naïve and natural creature, capable of spontaneity and physical tenderness towards her child who accompanies her and also towards Ether.

Signs that Ether is sick are already visible. Despite being feverish he decides, against the advice of the gang, to attempt a break in inside the hospital. He is caught in the act, arrested and taken to the prison hospital.

From this moment the film uses cadences and iconography which reference The Passion. In a poem taken from the collection ‘Poetry in the Form of a Rose’, written at the same time as the film was being made almost as a diary of events in verse, the author himself seems to suggest this interpretation when he speaks of a ‘People’s Passion’.

The first ‘station of the cross’ is represented by the ‘prison hospital’. The setting is white and bare, almost solemn; the funereal character, the vestibule of Hell atmosphere of the scene is clearly expressed by the recitation, apparently surreal, of the first verses of the fourth Canto of Dante’s inferno, by one of the prisoners.

It refers us back to one of the recurrent stylistic symbols of the film: the positioning of the sublime (Dante’s Divina Commedia) and the ridiculous (the facial expressions of the prisoners). In a most unjustified and unexpected way one of the characters hums the tune to the Violino tzigano? The melody, so closely linked to the figure of the mother, brings on a violent convulsion accompanied by delirium in Ettore, which leads to him being tied to a restraining bed.

In the next scene, which opens accompanied by the doleful and pitiful music of Vivaldi, Ettore is clearly framed ‘crucified’ on the wooden bench of his cell, the new Christ of Suburbia. The music, an extract from the Concerto in D Major by Vivaldi, expresses intense pathos and contains the theme of the Pietà, a universal Pietà that communes with and weeps with all the victims of sadness. In other points in the film the music of Vivaldi is used to underline the most dramatic sequences giving voice to the theme of destiny accompanied by an intentional contrast between sordid existence and the sublime.

The images, filled with dramatic intensity, are laden with references to Fine Art. The way in which the prone body of the boy is framed brings to mind the Dead Christ by Mantegna, despite the denials of Pasolini. The scene depicts the young man lying on a sort of bed, bound hand and foot, with a vacant expression, lost in a void. We see the same tragedy and the same pain in the face of the young man as we see in the face of Mantegna’s Christ. The image in the film, just as in the painting, captures the horror of death as the end of everything that is positive in life and the piteous martyrdom of the young man.

The light which filters through the grate reminds us of the way Raphael experiments with light and shadow in his painting of Saint Peter in prison. The words whispered by Ettore in his final agony are a lament and a plea to his mother at the point of death.

A kind of dialogue at a distance between mother and son is established – again very representative of the Suffering Mother of the Passion. The next frame places Anna Magnani right in the forefront with heavy chiaroscuro, an image of essential tragic intensity which condenses the dramatic nucleus of the event.

The impassioned delivery of the actress is certainly one of the highpoints of the film, regardless of the wishes or intentions of the director who would have perhaps preferred a less naturalistic interpretation. The dramatic impact of the character emanates spontaneously through the temperament and sensibility of Anna Magnani’s acting which gives depth and weight to all the women she has played in her rich and varied career, beginning with neo-realist cinema. In this film the frank working-class acting of the protagonist alternates with tones which are at times grotesque, at times strained and at times symbolic of other sequences in her career.

In the last scenes the religious references thicken: the bread broken by the mother, the way she drags her cart exhausted like a cross on a modern-day Via Crucis, the attempt at consolation by a ‘good samaritan’ in the guise of a working-class man (‘It’s water under the bridge, it’s water under the bridge’ – a reference to the trials and tribulations of life.), the chorus of mourners who accompany the mother after the announcement of her son’s death. The music takes on the solemn tones of a requiem. In these images the popularist and heterodox Christianity of the director are to be found: we kind find explicit references to these final scenes in some of the verses in the collection ‘Poetry in the Form of Roses’ previously mentioned: ‘Then the vision. The Passion of the people / ( an endless tracking shot with Maria / moving forward, asking after her son in Umbrian, singing about the agony in Umbrian).’

In the epilogue you see Ettore, almost rigid in death and Mamma Roma, distraught by the news, running desperately homewards, followed by people who are salt of the earth, to make an extreme gesture. This image explicitly recalls a cinematographic moment in one of the most important films of Italian Neo-Realism ‘Roma, Città Aperta’ (Rome, Open City’) by Roberto Rossellini, in which the same actress launches into a desperate chase in an extreme attempt to snatch a dear one from the clutches of the Nazis.

The open window, from which the protagonist tries to throw herself, frames subjectively for the last time desolate working-class Rome. This frame more than any other appears in the latter part of the film to confirm the submerged rôle of the city as the centre of events, together with mother and stepmother impassively and indifferently broken by the irrationality of human events. New Rome, a monument to urban decline, a product of the economic boom, is both an expression of moral degeneration and a testament to the insignificance of existence which unfurls around us.

The last image, in which the shocked stare of Anna Magnani is framed, puts the seal on the film, almost as if to suggest that the city itself, with its inextricable contradictions, is in some way another protagonist, the theatre which makes possible the inexorable chain of events.

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