• La Strada

10/6/24 (Sun)

Fellini’s 1954 breakthrough work. Zambanò, a brutish wandering performer with a strongman act, has lost his assistant under unclear circumstances, so he has come back to the bereaved family to purchase her sister Gelsomina as a replacement for 10,000 lire. The mother notes that Gelsomina is a bit slow-witted – “She just came out a little strange” –and is devastated at the circumstances that essentially force her to sell the girl for the sake of the others in the family.

Zambanò takes her on the road, teaching her to play the trumpet and perform for the crowds in conjunction with his act before passing the hat for contributions. She does everything she can to please him but receives only cruelty in return, physically manhandled (though never sexually) and treated like an object rather than a human being. She is especially disillusioned when he spends the night with another woman, leaving her on the street, though she typically manages to find wonder in a group of children. She tries running away, but Zambanò soon finds her and drags her forcibly into a circus act. There, a high-wire artist known as the Fool takes a disliking to the strongman, and their dispute causes them both to be fired.

Gelsomina tells the Fool in despair that her life is meaningless. She then experiences a profound moment when he tells her that even a tiny pebble has its place in the world. He suggests to the surprised Gelsomina that Zambanò may actually like her. (“Why not? He’s like a dog. Ever see those dogs who look like they want to speak, but all they do is bark?”) Staring at the pebble, she comes to believe that she is there to give love to Zambanò.

At a convent, a nun takes pity on her. When Gelsomina tells her that she constantly travels, the nun responds that her life is similar, changing convents every two years to avoid becoming attached to material things. (Shades of Ise Shrine, Japan’s holiest shrine, which is destroyed and rebuilt every 20 years under the same philosophy.) Staying too long in one place risks “forgetting your most important attachment, which is to God. So you see, we both travel. You follow your husband, and I follow mine.”

Gelsomina is invited by the nun to take refuge in the convent, but with a new sense of purpose, she chooses to stay with the strongman. She continues to follow him on the road, where he does his best to scrounge up a living.

There they happen upon the Fool, who is changing a tire. After an exchange of words, another fight ensues. Zambanò punches the Fool so hard that he unintentionally kills him. Panicking, he dumps the body in a field and pushes the car off a slope. Gelsomina is shocked, but Zambanò can only respond uneasily, “I have to make a living.”

They move on, but Gelsomina is utterly broken. She can only mutter repeatedly, “The Fool is hurt.” She is unable to perform with the same verve as before and becomes a liability. Zambanò makes the callous decision to sneak off and abandon her while she sleeps on the ground. One sign of change comes just before he goes, when he covers her quietly with an extra blanket, an unexpected act of kindness. Then when he spots her trumpet in the car, he brings that and lays it down next to her along with some clothes and money. As he rides off, this is the last time we will see her.

Several years later, he overhears someone singing the tune that Gelsomina used to play. He learns that Gelsomina had been found on the beach in bad condition and, despite the efforts of the villagers, died weak and wasted. Zambanò, stunned at the news, gets drunk, staggers off toward the ocean, looks to the sky, and breaks down and cries uncontrollably. Through her death, Gelsomina has achieved her purpose: Zambanò has discovered a heart, though only to find it broken.

Giulietta Masina was a wonder as Gelsomina, a name meaning jasmine in Italian that derives from the Persian for “gift from God”. She is often compared to Chaplin’s tramp (the actor himself gave her high praise), but she reminds me of a vocal version of Harpo Marx with her wide eyes and animated facial expressions, which in her case come off as completely natural. Her joy, for example, when she is trying on hats – her guileless smile, her impish eyes peeking upward – is priceless. Her innocence leads inevitably to disenchantment when she encounters the real world, which in Masina’s performance is heartrending, as if a child or blameless creature were crushed by powers beyond its understanding. The actress is also pitilessly dumped in her next film, the marvelous Nights of Cabiria, but that ends in a more positive tone in the character’s unquenchable belief that something better is always ahead. Here, her fate is almost unbearably cruel. Fellini essentially wrote the role for Masina, his wife at the time, and resisted resolutely when the producers sought another actress. I’m glad he stuck to his guns.

Quinn was also first-rate as the strongman Zambanò. He did not hold back from the character’s despicable brutality, making his final revelation all the more moving. It presumably helped that he acted his role in English, as all the film’s actors, even the Italians, were later dubbed (Quinn was voiced by the same guy who did Mifune Toshiro in The Seven Samurai). American actor Richard Basehart was rather over the top as the Fool, but he did come through in the key speech about the pebble.

The film apparently was not well received in Italy upon its initial release, when directors and audiences were evidently steeped in more realistic fare than the poetic whimsy depicted here. I found it unforgettable. A great film by any measure.