It is easy enough to pick holes in Mamma Roma as a cry of social protest. The plot, on the face of it, is mawkish…. The development is arbitrary, with Mamma Roma drunkenly confiding instalments of her past to a string of grinning men who loom conveniently in and out of the darkness as she roams the neon-lit highway…. And yet Mamma Roma expresses exactly and unsparingly what its writer-director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, feels: complete subjective identification with the latent fatalism of his characters…. I happen to find all this extraordinarily moving for the reason that such melodramatic situations are, for all that, elementally true. Pasolini's evasion of conventional realism strikes me as being deliberately used to underline a similar evasion on the part of his characters; just as his unintegrated camera style mirrors their underlying states of mind, all opportunism and casual brutality.

In its rhetorical way...