Mamma Roma

As I continue to educate myself on the neo-realist films of Itlay, I watched my first Pier Paolo Passolini film, Mamma Roma (1962), another tragic post WWII story of despair in Rome. It is dominated by the livewire performance of Anna Magnanai as the powerful presence known as  "Momma Roma." She tried to quit "the business" to go legit as a vegetable seller and raise her teenage son Eittor, but he has developed some bad habits over the years and is a constant disappointment to his mother, who is only living for and through him at this point in her life. It has all the traditional hallmarks of that Italian movement like mostly real outdoor locations, several unprofessional actors. Passolini brings a sense of the iconoclast in staging religious symbols in this film that shocked the public at the that time.