La Strada (1954)
Directed by Federico Fellini

Film Review

The film that earned Federico Fellini his international reputation and won him the first ever Foreign Language Film Oscar was La Strada, a landmark Italian film that is regarded by many as the director's greatest work.  With the confidence of a true master, Fellini brings a lyrical poetry to the familiar trappings of Italian neo-realist cinema and the result is one of the most truthful, emotionally rich and satisfying of his films.

La Strada is a film which is loaded with symbolism, and its ambiguity admits many interpretations.  One reading of the film is that it is about the nobility of the human spirit set against the reality of an earthy physical existence.  This dichotomy is crystallised in the form of the two principal male characters - the waiflike Fool and the brutish Zampanò, the two men between whom the heroine Gelsomina is torn, like a moth unable to choose between two equally attractive lights.  Whilst Zampanò represents everything that is plain and vulgar in human existence, the Fool personifies all that is wondrous - imagination, poetry and grace.  The strongman must go through the ritual of breaking chains on his chest every day to show that he is free, whereas the Fool flaunts his sense of freedom through a dangerous tightrope act.   Zampanò's unthinking brutality destroys the Fool and all that he represents as easily as a man may crush the life from a butterfly.  Nowhere else in Fellini's oeuvre is his use of the visual metaphor so powerful, so incisive as it is here.

The part of Gelsomina is played by Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, already an established actress.  In what is arguably the high point of her career (and incidentally the part that earned her the unwelcome epithet of the female Chaplin), Masina manages not only to capture brilliantly the pathos of her character's predicament, but also to convey something of the flawed nature of the human condition, in particular that perverse reluctance to free oneself from the baser instincts to achieve some kind of personal sanctity.  Her attraction for Zampanò loses her first her family, then her adoring Fool, and finally her God (by betraying the kindnesses shown to her by a group of nuns).  It is devastatingly tragic fall from grace which Masina's understated performance renders harrowingly believable and almost too painful to watch.

Anthony Quinn makes a striking contrast with Giulietta Masina.  Tough, brooding and thoroughly unsympathetic (at least for much of the film), Quinn's portrayal of Zampanò characterises all that is bad in human nature.  Yet, in the film's unforgettable final paragraph, the actor manages to win our sympathy as we realise he is as much a helpless victim of his circumstances as was Gelsomina and the Fool.  Richard Basehart's portrayal of the Fool is just as effective, providing a skilfully drawn counterpoint to Quinn's rough-edged Zampanò.

If there is one film that marks Federico Fellini as a cinematic genius, that film is most assuredly La Strada.  Not only is the film a beautifully shot composition, drawing on neo-realist principles without slavishly adhering to the politics of the neo-realist movement.  Not only does the film feature quite possibly the greatest performances from two great actors.  What sets La Strada apart as possibly the finest Fellini is that, in spite of its apparent simplicity, it seems to tell us so much about human experience.  Without any of the vulgar excess and self-indulgence that would come to define Fellini's later works, La Strada is a striking visual parable which touches the heart, a work of great compassion and humanity.

Film Synopsis

Learning of her sister's death, a young peasant woman Gelsomina allows herself to be sold as her replacement - mistress and assistant to Zampanò, an itinerant strongman.  Although her new master treats her like a dog, Gelsomina relishes her new life.  She plays the drum whilst he breaks an iron chain by expanding his chest, to the applause of roadside spectators.  But then Gelsomina gradually becomes upset by Zampanò's harshness and apparent lack of compassion for her.  The tenderness Gelsomina seeks is to be found elsewhere, in a young acrobat known as The Fool, whom she gets to know when she and Zampanò join up with a travelling circus.  Gelsomina's affair with The Fool ends in tragedy, but still she cannot bear to leave Zampanò.  In the end it is the strong man who decides to put an end to their association - with devastating consequences...