|
|
 |
| Federico Fellini | 1954 |
|
Click image to purchase
|
 |
 Italy  |
La Strada is brilliant. Descriptions like "riveting" and "enthralling" and "rapturous" come to mind as well. The movie begins with a small, mousey woman walking across a deserted section of a beach. As she walks away from the camera towards the waves, a few small children circle around her. Cut to an older woman and several children. This woman is a little whiney and irritating but you really don't have to deal with her that much. In this scene, the older woman is selling her daughter "Gelsomina {Giulietta Masina}" to "Zompano {Anthony Quinn}".
Zompano is a guy that travels around the country on a motorcycle. He's affixed a cart to the bike so that he has a sort of traveling home. Zompano stops in small towns along the way and does a "strongman" show so as to make enough money to eat. He intends to take Gelsomnia along with him and teach her the ropes of the profession. He needs an assistant to do things like; announce him to the audience, play the occasional drum roll and, in general, act as a clown. He even dresses her up in clown clothes.
Gelsomnia is cute and not overly attractive and maybe a bit slow. She really seems to be excited by the idea of becoming an artist and travelling around singing and dancing and being "special".
As time goes by, Zompano proves to be a cold and irritable guy. Gelsomnia forgives much of this but it doesn't take a lot of time before Zompano becomes pretty abusive. Still, Gelsomnia forgives much of this. She's had a fairly abusive past and really doesn't think a whole lot of herself. She seems to truly believe that she's the one at fault when Zompano takes whatever angst he's built up through the day out on her. The story here is a simplistic sort of "on the road" thing that involves the couple wandering from town to town, having adventures and meeting all manner of new people. The interplay between Tony and Giulietta is beautifully played. Both actors put in amazing performances.
Where this really rises above most other movies is in Gelsomnia's character. The woman can tell whole volumes with a simple expression. She could, quite likely, break your heart with a look. She does come close to this many times over the course of this film. Gelsomnia comes across as a sort of female version of Chaplin's "Little Tramp" or Emmett Kelly's "Wearie Willie" and many people have made just that comparison. The documentary footage that comes packaged with The Nights of Cabiria mentions that many people were calling her a female Chaplin about the time these films were made. This movie could have been silent and still worked at many levels. Guilietta doesn't even need to open her mouth to tell you what's going on. Don't let the "comedic" comparisons fool you. This movie has its share of tragedy.
A young Richard Basehart plays the part of a circus "fool" in this that's absolutely unlike anything you've ever
seen him do on television. He's quite likable and loves making fun of Zompano. His character adds a bit of comic relief
and is pretty impressive in contrast to his commander of the Seaview
role. I'm not sure I'd actually seen him as an actor before I saw this.
Historically, La Strada has a firm basis in the films of the earlier Italian Neo-Realists and represents something of a transition from the earlier style to something a bit less literal. Neo-Realism's intent was to show the "real" life in Italy at the time. {hence the label}. Fellini is moving away from that here. The cinematography and camera work in this film are very nice. Fellini can make spectacle out of nearly anything. Unfortunately, this is a bit degraded by time. There are several places in which the condition of this film is just a little sad. Many of the edits are glitchy, some of the dissolves look nearly as bad as they do in video files that have been compressed at high rates with MPEG and the sound is out of synch through many minutes of this movie. That said, there aren't a lot of movies in pristine condition that have me grinning from beginning to end the way that this one does.
La Strada won the award for best foreign language film at the academy awards. It was produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti.
