Italian neorealism is a style of film branded by stories set against a milieu of the poor or working class. Neorealism usually uses a good amount of amateur actors and is often filmed on location. Most Italian neorealist films contend with the economic and moral conditions of Italy after World War II, thus reflecting the change in the consciousness of the Italian people as they encounter change, poverty, despair, and defeat. Federico Fellini worked with neorealism a few times in his career, but his films often reflected a shift from neorealism to the tragic malfunction of the human condition to rise to the challenges set after the war.
La Strada is one such transitional movie. Fellini’s 1954 masterpiece reflects the shift from the neorealist notion of social concerns to the concerns of the individual, namely that of compassion in the face of desolation. The title, which means “The Road,” refers in part to the journey Fellini’s characters take throughout the film. Along the road, his characters meet a cast of humans gifted with compassion and warmth. This reflects the true heart of La Strada, demonstrating that this plain and frank little film has something affectionate at its core.
La Strada is very wistful in its nature and this point is heavily accented by the film’s Nino Rota score and by the performance of Giulietta Masina. Masina is Gelsomina, a clownish young girl sold for a few coins by her poor mother to strongman Zampano (Anthony Quinn). Zampano is a performer and drives around the country performing his trick, which is to break a chain with his chest and pass the hat for donations. Zampano is a brusque individual and he abuses Gelsomina as he trains her to be his sidekick. Gelsomina is delicate, but she cannot avoid the effects of Zampano on her spirit. Ever the optimist, Gelsomina remains with Zampano as her spirit crumbles.
A light enters the life of Gelsomina in the appearance of The Fool (Richard Baseheart). The Fool is a circus acrobat who teaches Gelsomina that there is more to her life than pitiless and gratuitous servitude. In telling her that even the slightest of pebbles has a purpose in the universe, The Fool introduces Gelsomina to hope. It turns out that Zampano and The Fool have a long-standing enmity and it eventually boils over, causing Gelsomina to see her hope crushed out and have her spirit broken once and for all. Zampano and Gelsomina deal with the changes in her spirit in their own ways, leading to one of the most memorable finales in all of film history.
Like many films of this nature, page after page of analysis and artistic investigation has been dedicated to figuring out Fellini’s symbolism and his inner workings. La Strada is, perhaps like all of Fellini’s work, reasonably effortless to take hold of. You need not be a film expert or a cinephile to understand what La Strada means or what purpose the characters serve. Fellini’s motion picture is based around the simple concept of a brute in the company of an angel. The brute, Zampano, is based largely on Fellini’s own experiences from his youth in Rimini. According to Fellini, there was a pig castrator who lived there who was known as a loutish womanizer. The disposition of Zampano came from his memories of the castrator.
Fellini’s approach to telling the story here is almost down-to-earth in its plainness, making it one of the easiest of his films to get into for newcomers. He leaves out some of the visual bluster of his other works and instead tells the story with slight camera movements and little trickery in the editing process. The results are fresh and distinctive. The characters are the focus here and La Strada is more a mythology passed down through the ages and less an exercise in neorealist film style. The plot is straightforward too, unlike many neorealist films.
La Strada picked up the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Fellini would win that Oscar three more times with Nights of Cabiria, 8 ½, and Amarcord. All of those films are excellent in their own way, but La Strada is perhaps the only film of the four Oscar winners that delivers the moral compass of its characters in such a reflective and simplistic way. After its release, the Catholics were all over La Strada and endorsed it because of its apparent proclamation of faith. Conversely, Marxists and others were all over it because they had assumed that Fellini had “sold out.” But here was a simple story about a woman in the face of brutishness. Additional meaning comes from within the viewer, not inevitably from within the film itself.
With most films of this nature and, to an extent, with most films in general, there is an inclination to perform scrupulous examinations of the material to find veiled meanings and infinitesimal details. The study of film is an interesting one, but sometimes the study of film can prove to strip away meaning rather than add more. After reading meticulous extrapolations of meaning about La Strada and after considering the film, its performances, and Fellini’s direction, I still reach the conclusion that it is a simple story with heart and simplicity at its core. It is also an exceptionally gorgeous and poignant motion picture that should be seen by anyone with an interest in Fellini or wonderful movies.
10/10
