The Italian films are some of those that I have always have had a bit of an ambivalent relation to. I remember in my boyhood days, that such movies would surprisingly (by today´s standards) be shown on national television and and particularly the flat, synchronized speech was deterring from the overall experience. Add to that the usually extroverted emotional expression usually common to the Mediterranean area, was exotic (to be nice) for me. Never the less, some of the deepest and most profound film experiences was from the Italian directors, and the most remarkable (for me) was Fellini´s La Strada. (spoilers ahead)
It is as far as I know, the first real full feature by Fellini, but what a statement it is. Fellini arrives, much like Truffaut in France a decade later, on the scene after being involved as a journalist and working partly in the film business, before he took over the rudder and directed movies himself. La Strada is as in your face and honest as The 400 Blows was 10 years later. While Truffaut inspired a new wave of french cinema, Fellini arrives at the tail end of a series of neorelistic movies in the war torn aftermath of world war two. Fellini is less realism and more poeticism. He has a soft spot for the circus and the pretense of fun by the clown versus the dark reality of life behind the funny outfit.
Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) is basically sold by her family (mother?) into servitude as a kind of comic relief for the travelling artist Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who is a rude and nihilistic type of man. He has the traits of a weak personality who has to appear macho and intimidating in order to feel that he is in control of his life.
As we get to know him, his personality contrasts harder and harder to the soft, naive and open personality of Gelsomina. He constantly treats her as a slave. If she please him he puts her down, if she tries to think for herself, he puts her down ... yet when she leaves him in disparity, he finds her and commands her back to work for him.
When Gelsomina finds a friend in an old competitor of Zampano´s she is full of joy and hope. Since he is the diametrical opposite from Zampano, he becomes a serious competitor to Zampano and the conflicts eventually ends in a situation where he kills the competitor.
Gelsomina finds a way of tolerating her life with the brute and emotinally shut man. Meanwhile, Zampano, in his perpetually fight for survival and keeping up his macho appearances, slowly realizes that he is not living his own life, he is not living in a way that is true to his own emotions. Gelsomina´s undeniable positivity, slowly melts his fortress and he discover that he needs to be himself in order to actually show love for others.
Zampano realizes that the only way he can show the girl "love" is by leaving her, so that he do not have to express his love and fragility, while being able to keep up appearances. His show is rather pathetic but he is the kind of person who cannot find any faults in himself, so he just keeps going. But the dismantling of his personality has set in and is irreversible. Too late he realizes that he has to find Gelsomina again but that she has died meanwhile and that he has no where else to go, either as an "artist" or a person. The last scene (could it have been an inspiration for Truffaut) is a man who has sunk into desparation and looks both out at the empty sea, the empty sky and the empty land ... and can only observe one thing .. his own primal scream.
There is one thing that detracts in the overall experience. Masina (Fellini´s real life wife) lacks a bit of scope in her emotional expressions. She settles with the clown like simplicity of very sentimantal or overjoyed. I know that this is deliberate and works as a contrast to the onesided moodyness of Zampano and in many ways is what pulls him down. But two hours of these two opposites only, is a bit two dimensional for me. But this is basically the only real negative I have, because the cinematography is surprisingly solid and even slightly expressionist at times, even if Fellini CLEARLY is of the neorealistic school. The scenes are joyfully simple and of a rare barebone beauty, that is hard to find anywhere else. This was quite groundbreaking for cinema outside of Italy and probably the reason why it received an Oscar.
While the female lead is a memorable and expressive, my cadaux goes to Quinn for a truly impressive performance, particularly as an americam actor in a foreign movie. His antics fits so well with this part that one thinks he is just being himself and not really playing a part. In my book he carries the movie to the next level.
8/10