Synopsis

The film is set in Rome, in the early '60s. During the wedding banquet of Carmine, Roma Garolfo (a prostitute nicknamed Mamma Roma) claims she is going to give up her profession to take care of her son, Ettore, who was brought up by a wet-nurse. Now that she is free of her pimp, Roma wants to re-establish a mother and son relationship and to start a new, respectable life with Ettore, who is already a teeenager.

Roma has bought a newly built home on a housing estate near Cinecittą and has got a trading licence for a fruit and vegetable stall in the local market. Her dream of bourgeois respectability is shattered, however, by fate - personified by Carmine who comes back to blackmail her. He forces her to postpone the move and to take up her old profession again. Roma resists, however, and she and Ettore start a new life in a popular district, on the outskirts of Rome.

Ettore begins mixing with a group of boys his own age. Mamma Roma believes they are of good family, but actually they are idlers living by their wits and theft. In particular, Ettore gets to know and falls in love with Bruna, a 24-year-old single mother, whose mixture of naivety and malice provides sexual entertainment for the whole district. Ettore leaves school, and his mother, aware of the risks he is running, tries desperately to find him a job.

At first she appeals to the parish priest, but he only offers moral advice and a job for Ettore as a bricklayer - which Mamma Roma refuses. Instead she blackmails the owner of a restaurant, who is a church-goer but also a client of a former professional colleague. Travelling on his brand new motorcycle, bought by his mother, Ettore starts working as a waiter in a Trasteverine restaurant.

Once again Carmine comes back. He asks for money and forces Roma to prostitute herself again - ironically by threatening to reveal her past to Ettore. Seized by anguish and a sense of doom, she again walks the streets but Bruna tells Ettore his mother is a prostitute and he, in a fit of rage, beats her, leaving his job at the restaurant and joining his gang of idler friends.

Weak and in a feverish state, Attore is caught thieving from a hospital patient and imprisoned. In a frenzied state he is strapped to a contention bed, and dies in complete loneliness. When she hears of her son's death, Roma is overcome by despair. She runs madly through the street, followed and helped by the market people and the film ends with a POV shot giving us the gaze of Mamma Roma, lost in a cruel and violent Rome.

The Social Context

The Catastrophe

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