La Strada
November 22, 2003
When you look up “spirit” in Webster’s Dictionary you get at least 11 different definitions. From, “the temper or disposition of mind or outlook,” to “the activating or essential principal influencing a person,” not to mention an alcoholic drink and a ghost, it’s not an easily grounded word. But if a person exudes a high or low spirit, it’s pretty definable on their face. In Federico Fellini’s famous Oscar-winning film “La Strada” (’54), the spirit of human soul and suffering is powerfully represented in its three main characters and it’s a tour de force of feeling, broken dreams, and living. If ever there was a film to go along with the Cicero phrase, “the spirit is the true self,” than “La Strada” is it.
Let’s take the story first before getting into the quintessentially human spirit of the characters and their famous director. “La Strada”, translated as “The Road”, takes place in and around small, desperate villages on the Italian countryside, not yet ten years removed from the devastation of the war, as Zampano, a brutish traveling strongman appears at the house of his recently deceased assistant/wife. He comes to fetch a new girl, his wife’s second eldest sister, Gelsomina, a shy, poor, expressionistic young woman whose mother gladly hands her over to the man for 10,000 lire to support her other four daughters. No matter how the pairing plays out through the rest of the film, it’s always predicated on this first scene, which is tantamount to a master buying a slave. The poverty dictates the situation, and for Gelsomina, seen at first in back profile on the beach carrying a bushel of hay, before we get a close-up of her puzzled face, it’s just a matter of placement over position, it’s either the continuing poverty of living with her mother and four sisters, or the new life with Zampano as his slave/sidekick, picking up coins, acting the clown and getting whipped like a donkey by a boar.
The title is uncannily appropriate because, like earlier neo-realist films (for which it easily fits as a second cousin) the film is basically a travelogue from one town along the road to the next. Zampano lives out of the trailer attached to his rustic motorcycle and every day a new town represent a new audience (with new coins) to perform his strongman act in front of. Gelsomina simply stands by banging a drum while he breaks an iron hook with his chest, a lame stunt that impresses the starved-for-entertainment peasants of the countryside. Eventually she gets to partake in the charade, donning a bowler hat (in a nod to Chaplin) and clown makeup to bring some light to a depressing moment in her life as, essentially, a captive and to the townspeople lives of poverty and hunger.
In typical Fellini style (pre-“8 ½” anyway) the structure to the film is comprised of vignettes of life, both celebratory and disenchanting. At a stop after her acquisition, Zampano hands Gelsomina her drum and teaches her to use it properly, to announce his presence for the audience. After two miserable attempts, he cuts a switch and lashes her leg twice before she gets it right, paying a price for what her immediate future (perhaps the rest of her life) will be like. Similarly in the subsequent scene, Zampano throws her into the truck as a fade to black suggests a forthcoming rape, before cutting to her face, in an ellipsis of about 7 hours, waking up with a sour look and a quizzical smile. She is childlike, and can go from happy to sad in a momentary instance, and throughout the film, in scenes involving a wedding party, a religious procession, and even a simple dinner, her face is always balanced between happiness and total devastation, the latter winning out in the end.
The plot is simplistic in form, but has power, symbolism and poetry and getting back to the spirits of the film, cornerstones in characterization and emotion. The two main characters, Zampano and Gelsomina, along the way encounter a young circus acrobat called The Fool (Richard Basehart), who is a cheery fellow that hates Zampano and takes to the optimism and tragic plight of Gelsomina. The Fool, it could be argued, is the essential spirit to the film. His is a presence of potential happiness, not just for Gelsomina, who adores him, but to the peasants as well, who revel in his high wire acts and comedy. But in this depressed Fellini world of ups and downs, he is left defenseless (wit doesn’t count in the long run) away from the crowds, falling to the hand of Zampano on a desolate country road, where fate blew out his tire in the path of an angry enemy. “Everything in this world has a purpose,” he says, and in saying so apologizes not only for death, but also for cruelty and unmistakable bad luck as well.
For Gelsomina (so memorably portrayed to Chaplinesque clownish pathos by Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina) the spirit is seen all in her face, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking the way Zampano can crush it in a flash. If the spirit is indeed the true self, than we can look no further than that opening sequence (echoed time and again in the film, especially in a layover at a convent) when Zampano takes her away as a perfect example. At first she looks frightened, but then in an instant we get that great closed-mouth smile of hers, suggesting a potential happiness at being wanted and getting out of her present living situation. Numerous times she looks like she could end up happy with Zampano (deniability is always the biggest obstacle to overcome in the psyche of a battered woman) but after it all, the abuse and the murder of her only angel, The Fool, her spirits are shattered for good and, for a film that does have much brilliant kindness and humor, the arch of Gelsomina is as tragic as a Verdi opera, or a Shakespeare play.
If she represents a good spirit broken, than Zampano (Anthony Quinn) symbolizes that of life itself (or even Italy during and after the war), that of misunderstanding and near uncontrollable anger at being dealt a bad fate. He is a louse, that’s a given, often standing up Gelsomina for a one night stand with a local floozy, but if there is redemption to be found in the film, it comes through his fate, which turns from bad to worse after the murder (accidental or not) of The Fool. Fellini wants us to care for Zampano, and in the films final moments, by way of feeling sorrow, we finally do give in, as Otello Martelli’s camera lingers on his rugged, worn-out face, looking up at god, questioning the spirit in humanity and breaking down on the beach (perhaps the same beach he found Gelsomina on? Giving the film a cyclical story arch.) we can’t help but think that, had he learned his lesson one day sooner, all could have been well.
But then “La Strada” might not have been so powerful, and the final spirit, that of Fellini, wouldn’t have transcended so deeply. In his following film, “Nights of Cabiria” (the third in a off-shoot neo-realist trilogy that started with “I Vitelloni” in ’53) Fellini would give Masina the last laugh, as her Cabiria, equally as downtrodden, yet more realistic and smarter than Gelsomina, leaves the picture with a wonderful smile and close-up, after being jerked around by every man she’s known. With Fellini, the realism of human spirit is often shattered, and in his biggest successes (“8 ½”, “La Dolce Vita”) they exist somewhere between a fantasy world of decadence and carnivals and a real world of loneliness and resonance, and in “La Strada”, a quintessentially early Fellinian travelogue, the master was firmly beginning to grasp his understanding of what it is to realize life isn’t a dream.
“Great spirits,” said Einstein, “have always found violent opposition from mediocrity.” In Fellini’s triumph, Gelsomina’s heartbreak, The Fool’s misplacement, and Zampano’s stubborn redemption, mediocrity may not have been avoided, but a sense of spiritual transcendence is achieved. Just look hard enough and you’ll find it, deep in the faces, buried beneath infrequent smiles and big sad eyes.
“La Strada” has been released on DVD by The Criterion Collection with a beautiful and crisp new print, featuring an introduction by Martin Scorsese, an hour-long Italian television documentary on Fellini, and a feature length commentary by Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella.
by Adam Suraf