- Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma
A few days after I watched Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin for work, I revisited Mamma Roma (1962) at the Pier Paolo Pasolini retrospective currently underway at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I found the films complemented each other rather nicely—both hinge on the perverse spectacle of a world-famous actress playing off a cast of everyday people. Mamma Roma stars Anna Magnani as a former prostitute from Italy’s rural poor; Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johansson as a space alien undercover in Scotland. Which is more implausible? Is it Pasolini’s film, with its realistic premise, or is it Glazer’s, which acknowledges the fundamental otherness of celebrities vis-a-vis the rest of us?
Pasolini viewed his relationship to his star as something of a creative stalemate. The director-star dynamic of Under the Skin suggests a stalemate between filmmakers and audience. In his Guardian review of Skin (one of the best I’ve read on the film), Leo Robson describes Johansson’s performance as “functioning as a screen for our projections. . . . Just as Sergio Leone said that he looked through Clint Eastwood’s face and saw a block of marble, so Glazer gets something boulder-like—impassive, abstracted—from Johansson.” Robson goes on to suggest that the movie “seeks to undermine our conventional strategies of creating meaning,” and one way it does this is by making Johansson’s movie-star allure seem unworldly.
