A half century after La Strada was made and widely accepted
as a world classic, the film needs to be evaluated by its content as much as by
its often touted “neo-realist” style. Interestingly,
Pope Francis considers La Strada to
be the film that he loves the most. Director Frederico Fellini considered this
work to be his most “representative
film”, most autobiographical, and one which he had the greatest trouble
“realizing” and finding a producer (p. 85 in Edward Murrays’s Ten Film Classics). Fellini also felt
close to all the three principal characters in the film (p. 115 in Gilbert
Salachas’ Federico Fellini).
First, it is interesting to study the three lead
characters--three distinct types of idiots/fools—that Federico Fellini and his
co-scriptwriters, Tulio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, presented us. These are characters
that provide the basic, pivotal elements
of the film. What made them create the three major characters? Were these
characters fools or intelligent folks playing the fools? Who survives and who
does not? Aren’t the three a reflection of the fool in each of us?
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| The fool Gelsomina--childlike innocence devoid of evil |
The first fool in the film the viewer encounters is a woman,
Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), who is childlike and innocent, fatherless and a
burden on her single mother, who in turn is struggling to feed her many
children. And Gelsomina, the fool, is most eloquent when she is silent. To top
it all, she is not a sexually or a physically attractive person. She is described in the film by another thus
“What a funny face! Are you a woman,
really? Or an artichoke?” She is the epitome of the innocent fool,
unattractive, and yet without a trace of evil. Even the nun who befriends her
sees parallels between Gelsomina and herself.
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| The fool Zampano--all brawn and no brains |
The second fool is Zampano (Anthony Quinn), the strongman,
who is a brute who uses his brawn more than his brains. Zampano does use his
limited intellect to earn his daily bread (he fools his audiences that he is
able to breaks chains strapped around his chest with a physical effort that could make his eyes pop out) but is not
smart enough to be able to recognize true love
or thank his benefactors who provide him shelter. He can never consider the
consequences of his actions. In the film he is compared with a dog “He is like a dog. A dog looks at you, wants to talk and only
barks.” One could assume that Rosa, Gelsomina’s sister, either fled Zampano’s
company or died while working for him. He believes his women can be bought
either for sex or for work. He does not realize that he needs long-term
companionship until it is too late. When Gelsomina suggests marriage he does
not even consider it as an option. The first scene of Zampano in the film La Strada suggests a wicked,
street-smart and physically overpowering man “buying” a woman. The final scene
of Zampano in the film suggests just the opposite, a vulnerable and sensitive
man, lonely and remorseful for his past actions, a King Lear who bemoans the
loss of a loved one. Zampano’s eloquence is not verbal, his physical expressions,
as Fellini captured them, in the final sequence of the film says more than all
the spoken words in the film just as director Arthur Penn captured the essence
of his film Night Moves (1975),
visually and non-verbally with the brilliant end sequence.
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| The professional fool Il Matto--well-read but ignorant of his limits of foolery |
The third fool is “Il matto” (The fool/The clown), a
professional fool, played by Richard Baseheart . The clown is the smartest of
the trio and a philosopher. He considers himself to be ignorant but he reads
books. He is able to spot the latent capability of Gelsomina . But he is not
smart enough to know when he has to stop playing the fool. He is the proverbial
jester of a king’s court, intelligent enough to spot talent and grasp universal
truths. In the most philosophically important line in the film he states “Everything is useful... This pebble for
instance.” When queried as why the pebble is useful, he replies even more
interestingly “If I knew, I would be the
Almighty who knew all. When you are born, and when you die... Who knows? I
don’t know for what this pebble is useful but it must be useful. For if it is
useless, everything is useless. So are the stars.” “Il
matto,” the clown, when dying, is philosophically worried that his watch is
broken, when it is his skull that is actually broken by Zampano.
Gelsomina is initially not able to play the trumpet but the
filmmakers without showing her practising to play the instrument suggests, as
the film progresses, that she had become close to the musical instrument
(Zampano leaves that trumpet with her as she sleeps blissfully unaware that Zampano
is leaving her). What is more, we also
learn later in the film that she has mastered the very musical notes that Il
Matto the clown had always played on his miniature violin to make the audience
laugh and cry.
Thus La Strada
presents the viewer with three kinds of fools: the simpleton, the boor, and the
professional clown, who pokes fun at others and at himself, sometimes to earn
money, sometimes by habit. Each one of us plays the fool some time in our lives—but
we need to identify for ourselves which kind and when we played each role.
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| Gelsomina playing on her trumpet Nino Rota's touching notes |
It is interesting to study how Fellini and his two
co-scriptwriters developed the story of La
Strada. It is well known that Fellini loved the circus and much of the
ideas of La Strada was a result of
this fascination. Fellini modeled Zampano’s character partly on a real-life pig castrator, who
was also a womanizer. He had wanted to
make a film on a travelling circus. But the concept of Gelsomina was the
contribution of Tulio Pinelli, who had seen a tiny woman pushing a cart just as
Gelsomina pushed the motorcycle driven van with a tarpaulin cover when it would
need a push to start. But it was Fellini who made Gelsomina the dim-witted
woman in the tale. The melancholic irony
of La Strada was possibly the
contribution of Ennio Flaiano, whose literary works represent that very bent of
mind. Thus, the film distills a tale picked up from real situations by three
writers to forge an unforgettable story of three unusual characters on the
fringes of society, a story delicately
woven to entertain a wider
audience over time, not just the Jury members at Venice Film Festival or the voting
Oscar Academy members but even the current Pope.
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| Zampano and Gelsomina on the road |
Is there religion in La
Strada? The only obvious religious reference is provided by the nuns who
provide Gelsomina and Zampano a place to stay overnight and Zampano rebukes
their generosity by stealing from his benefactors. The nun who befriends
Gelsomina comments that she views Gelsomina’s purpose in life to be much like
her own life with the nuns. “Il matto”,
the clown, sees Gelsomina’s life having
a purpose just as each pebble has a purpose. These are vignettes of philosophy
and theology that possibly appealed to Pope Francis who took his papal name
after St Francis of Assisi. And at the end of the film, a reflective viewer realizes
that the “pebble” of the film did have a purpose, which might not be so obvious
to some other viewers.
Nino Rota’s contribution of music to La Strada might not stand
out but the theme music first played
by “Il matto” (the fool/clown) on a kit violin is the same music/notes that
Zampano hears a stranger, a lady drying her laundry reproducing towards the end
of the movie. The strength of Nino
Rota’s music is not just the cadence of the philosophical theme “Travelling
down the lonely road” but the ability of Rota to capture the mood of the film
in those few notes and Fellini’s ability to use the music sparingly and yet so
strategically at the right moments in the film to underscore its vitality.
Director Ermanno Olmi, a neo-realist filmmaker of eminence,
has questioned has questioned the concept of neo-realism in cinema that
utilized professional actors in neo-realist cinema. In that context, where does
Fellini’s La Strada stand? For this
critic, actor Anthony Quinn has never been as impressive as he was in La Strada and perhaps in a little known
Biblical film of director Richard Fleischer called Barrabas (1961). Richard Basehart, too, has been an outstanding thespian in most
films that he appeared in and his role in La
Strada is not one that can easily be forgotten. But the real winner is Giulietta
Masina, who is able to bring shades of burlesque when presenting tragic realism
and slip so effortlessly into a role quite different from her real life. (It is
not surprising that she chose to study for a degree in philosophy just as her
husband Fellini, who graduated with a degree in philosophy and literature.} Thus,
if we subscribe to Olmi’s purist definition of neo-realism Fellini’s favourite
work does not fit into a neo-realist mode as La Strada is often considered to represent. Yes, the film did
capture the poorer sections of Italy with some honesty, but the recreation of
that reality was done by great accomplished actors.
Cineastes today might find it interesting to compare and
contrast La Strada with Nuri Bilge
Ceylan’s Turkish film Three Monkeys (2008).
Both films deal with three fools, two males and a woman. Both films have a touch
of melancholic irony. The films are
separated by half a century and two religious perspectives but the end result
is starkly similar. In both films, the three idiots are the losers at the end of the tale more as a result of their inherent personalities that they cannot control. They are parallel tales with totally divergent contexts. Yet both films offer much for a reflective viewer.
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| Fellini assesses his wife's transformation into Gelsomina |
There is more to the film if we extrapolate the film to the
lives of Fellini and his wife Masina. They were in love but their love life was
tragic—their only child died as an infant. This apparently affected them
unconsciously in their later work and lives. One can definitely assume Masina,
a close associate of Fellini and his wife, would have contributed to the
screenplay even though she is not officially credited with it. The two musical
instruments (apart from the drum introduced briefly) shown in La Strada, were
unconsciously linked to them. Masina was a daughter of a violinist mother,
though she was brought up by her aunt. It is therefore not surprising that violin
should be one of the two chosen instruments. And Fellini before his death requested that a
famous trumpeter play the notes of Nino Rota from the film La Strada over his grave at his funeral. Masina died soon after the death of her husband and both are
buried next to each other and their infant son. It is interesting to note how the
unconscious references to one’s life or those close to one’s life creep into
screenplays and to study how what the screenplay writer had developed in a screenplays affects him/her in later life. Thus, both the violin and trumpet were not just important
facets of La Strada's screenplay but of the filmmakers' lives as well.
La Strada won of
Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1957 and the Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival for
Federico Fellini.
P.S. La Strada is one of the author’s top100 films of all time. Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) with
Giullietta Masina, and Pier Paolo Pasolini as its co-scriptwriter, has been
reviewed on this blog earlier. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys (2008) has also been reviewed on this blog earlier.
