La Strada (1954, Italy, Frederico Fellini)


Dan Jardine:

The legendary Frederico Fellini began his career in movies as a screenwriter for neo-realist pioneer filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, and his great success would establish the expectation that Fellini would follow in his mentor’s footsteps. While his earliest films, including I Vitelloni, met with neo-realist’s approval, Fellini was soon subsequently denounced as a turncoat to the cause for crafting films, the first of which would be La Strada, that operated at a heightened level of reality, where fancy and fantasy would play vital roles. Fellini considered his films those of the Italian reconstruction, and rather than dwelling on the devastation left behind by the war, he wanted to point his films in a more guardedly hopeful direction. Yet, there is little doubt that La Strada has at least one foot firmly in the "old school" language of neo-realism, with its unvarnished depiction of a ravaged countryside, peopled by an often inarticulate and taciturn citizenry. Still, the film has an unmistakable other-ness to it as well, as it is an early precursor to the sort of magical realism the would take hold in Fellini’s late-career efforts.

La Strada is centered around the decidedly atypical and quite possibly symbolic figure of the part imbecile, part saint Gelsomina. Played by Fellini’s wife, Guilietta Masina, Gelsomina is an expressive, Chaplin of City Lights-era character who’s as open-hearted as she is dull-witted. It seems fitting (if cruel) that she is sold by her impoverished mother to a carnival strong man, Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who viciously trains her as both his sidekick and sexual conquest. Gelsomina has a bird-like quality, delicate and strangely beautiful, as well as a prophetic ability to predict the weather, yet she is unable to avoid the brutish Zampano’s fits of ineffable rage and violence.

With Gelsomina operating in full clown make-up, it is fitting that much of the film’s second half takes place in and around a circus, filling the film with quirky secondary characters who help give the film an alternate sense of reality. It is here that the put-upon Gelsomina meets the Fool (Richard Basehart), who appears to her almost as an angel, full-winged and floating above her on a tightrope (an image Wim Wenders would apprehend to full effect in the magnificent Wings of Desire). While he would later disappoint her, the Fool tries to guide her with his parable of the pebble, an act that would prove to be both her doing and undoing, urging her as he does to remain with and tend to the spiritually bereft Zampano.

Typical of most Fellini films, the narrative is episodic in nature, with the familiar motif of travel (La Strad literally means the road) providing the justification for the picaresque nature of the film. The film’s central characters —Gelsomina, Zampano and the Fool--are character types who somehow manage the neat trick of also being distinctive and dimensional creations. And Fellini knows how to push the empathy buttons, particularly with Gelsomina, whose innate saintliness and simultaneous powerlessness sometimes threaten to flood the film in tidal waves of pathos, as well as with the judicious deployment of a memorable Nino Rota-penned score (The Godfather). Fellini’s talent for using striking images to evoke moods and themes operates throughout, as the shot of a deserted Gelsomina watching a lonely horse clopping down the street in the wee hours can attest.

La Strada ends where it began, on a long stretch of abandoned shoreline. However, the journey that we (and the characters) have traveled leaves us perhaps even radically affected, and, like Zampano, changed permanently, and hopefully for the better.