Mamma Roma
Sep 03 - Sep 09, 2010
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1962, 35mm, 105 min)
Perhaps Pasolini’s greatest film, Mamma Roma packs an emotional wallop. Anna Magnani’s Mamma is a prostitute who tries to go respectable, bundling her troubled teenaged son off to Rome to tend a produce stand. The return of her pimp thwarts her new life.
In stone ruins and suburban housing projects, Pasolini finds a combination of the seamy and the lyric, the ugly and the classical, rough trade tempered by raw beauty. His dreamlike edits open neorealism to a transcendent modernity, though the film sears with reality. Raucously funny, woundingly moving, by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking, Mamma Roma is a must-see.
"Suggested: Draws its inspiration from the poetry of thought, philosophy" —The Stranger
"SW Pick: Very much a transitional work for Pier Paulo Pasolini, his 1962 Mamma Roma is also about a woman (Anna Magnani) and nation in transition." —Seattle Weekly
Don't miss Michelangelo Antonioni's Le Amiche, playing at Northwest Film Forum September 10-15!
