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Simply A Masterpiece

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Gelsomina lives a quiet life with her mother and three sisters. However, this sheltered existence is shattered when a travelling showman, Zampano, pays her mother so that Gelsomina will travel with and work for him. She is initially a reluctant participant in his line of work but soon tries to make the most of it, even learning some new skills. However, she has to contend with his brutish, unfeeling behaviour.Superb, emotional movie, written and directed by Federico Fellini. Quite a harrowing journey as Fellini here is an emotional sadist, heaping torment on the most innocent of souls. He toys with the audience, offering glimmers of hope and a promise of a better turn of events, only to dash these hopes soon thereafter.A similar theme to The Nights of Cabiria, released three years later, as we have an incredibly engaging and likable leading character trying to find something positive in a cynical, uncaring world. As with The Nights of Cabiria, while Fellini's plot and direction are brilliant, the movie is made by Giuletta Masina (his wife, incidentally). She is perfect as Gelsomina, mixing Chaplinesque physical comedy with heartbreaking innocence and forlornness. One cannot help but be engaging by her character and empathise with her plight. With her character sucking you into the narrative, you are at the mercy of Fellini's incredibly moving plot.Superb movie, Fellini's finest.

It's ridiculously late at night right now and I just finished watching Fellini's masterful classic "La Strada" for the very first (and, by the looks of it, certainly not last) time. I was planning on sleeping right after the film ended and publishing an IMDb review tomorrow, but the film had such a profound effect on me that I feel the need to review it now, and share my experience will all of you.Although it is a tragedy, "La Strada" still carries classic Fellini whimsy, magic, and humor. It also expresses his talent for storytelling, character, and ability to amuse and entertain while also being intelligent and meaningful. This is a carnivalesque dance of the human soul, exposing both the positives and negatives of life itself. The characters are some of the finest and most memorable I have ever seen in the film. There is the childlike and lovable heroine Gelsomina, the menacing, abusive, and yet surprisingly sympathetic villain Zampano, and the hilarious and inspiring Fool. These memorable personalities clash in a practically perfect film that combines neorealism with surrealism and tragedy with comedy. A true masterpiece if I've ever seen one.

Others might see symbolism in the characters of this film based on the elements and director Federico Fellini certainly includes his familiar tropes in this film such as the sea, circus, clowns, beach, good women and prostitutes.To me this is a road picture of two not very bright people who end up together. Zampano (Anthony Quinn) has a circus strong man routine travelling around in a beat up camper van pulled by a motor cycle. His companion Rosa has died, he goes to tell the news to her mother and buys Rosa's younger sister as a replacement. Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) who he brutally trains to be his assistant.Zampano is a brutish thug, a drinker, a womaniser. I was never convinced whether he loved or cared for Gelsomina, I believe she cares for him and even loved him.When both join a larger circus she comes into contact with the Fool (Richard Basehart) who is a clown and a high wire act. He is a sweet man to Gelsomina, even a kindred spirit but he senses that Gelsomina loves Zampano and maybe he loves her but cannot show it or say it because he just lacks the intelligence. The Fool like a few other people throughout the film offers her a way out from Zampano but she refuses.The Fool also has a deep dislike for Zampano, always taunting him and driving him to a rage. Eventually their path will cross again leaving Gelsomina mad and Zampano to abandon her. At the end Zampano is left unfolding his emotions to the sea. Maybe he eventually realised the love he has lost.There is distinctive music from Nina Rota. Actress Masina has a clown like way of movement which looked like Harpo Marx combined with Charlie Chaplin. You can see why the circus wanted her to stay. She had an inane sweetness in contrast with Quinn's Zampano whose only ability was the strongman act where he could break chains with his pectoral muscles. If he had any sense he might had realised that that being taunted by The Fool could had been incorporated into the circus act with beneficial results.There is a tragic undercurrent in this film very much from the first scene heightened by the black and white photography and Fellini's symbolism's which he revisited many times in the course of his career.

Life is a cruel and punishing road that often seems indignant at our audacity for simply walking along it. There are no guaranteed stops but for that ultimate destination, and so how we get there is entirely up to us. Or sometimes not at all. This isn't Cormac McCarthy's vision of The Road of life, in which the entire landscape is enveloped in nihilistic despair, but what McCarthy's road and Fellini's road both share is that the people traversing it have been dealt a meagre hand in life and have to work with what they've been given. The father and son in The Road, despite the post-apocalyptic oblivion that surrounds them, can survive because they have that sacrosanct shield of familial love to protect them. Here, the seed of love between the girl and her master was un-watered, unacknowledged, the cards they were given were misused, often not because of lack of trying but because of a pure inability to grasp them. What Fellini has constructed, like McCarthy in The Road, is a world of which the logistics do not matter, as the greater environment, whether that be an apocalyptic theatre or a or the sparse Italian landscape, simply serves to highlight its characters and their tragedy at its core. I had described this film as conventional, but it is only conventional in the sense that doesn't have these characteristics, and it's not something that you're necessarily deciphering every image. What we have here is a road movie, both literally and metaphysically (yes? The metaphysical road? Yeah, you know what I'm talking' about) in which is immediately accessible because the emotion is so palpable. I was mentioned in my Drive review the weight of physical acting, and how that often bridges the divide between film and audience just as effectively as dialogue does, and that really applies here. Gelsomina, played by Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, is such a wondrous presence; her waifish frame, the round face that is like a fishbowl in which we see all manner of emotion flicker by, and the naïve way in which she clowns about, both tentative and joyed is such a sympathetic synthesis that I'm surprised as to how I hadn't actually discovered this character before watching this film, and it seems that is generally agreed that she is something of a female counterpart to Chaplin. She has one of those readily iconic faces, and when she dons her clown make-up she wears these sharp vertical eyebrows that seem to exaggerate her already widened eyes, and throughout the film it is easy to get lost in both the humour and the sadness of them.Gelsomina is part of a large rural family that lives by the seaside, and in the opening shot she frolics at the shore, surrounded by a gaggle of playful children. Life seems fairly simple, and then the rugged and imposing Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) turns up, and buy Gelsomina from her mother for 10,000. The whole film carries that neo-realist edge, a world of social struggle, as it seems Gelsomina's mother is financially burdened, as we learn that she has already sold a daughter, named Rosa, prior to this arrangement. Apparently Rosa died. We are never explicitly told how or why, but it is easy to speculate, as we see Zampanò who light up a cigarette, all hulking physicality, as he waits to carry of this young girl away from her family forever, and as we soon learn the full extent of his brutality. Zampanò is a man who only seems to be able to communicate through his harsh physicality, through which he lives his entire life. He is a street performer, who only has one small novelty act, in which he tightens a chain around his chest and breaks its grip by a powerful exhale. He lives by rote, a simple creature who can easily break physical barriers but isn't capable of breaking emotional ones. As the movie progresses, it seems to almost fluctuate between different rhythms, at some points a comedic routine as when Zampanò tries to teach Gelsomina how to perform her simple musical duties with a drum and trumpet, in which she approaches with innocent wonder, and other points the feeling is quite sparse, with long stretches of sadness. I suppose it reflects the metamorphosing of their relationship, growing but never settling because it never has the chance. Gelsomina is ultimately something of a cipher, she seems slow-witted, her eyes flit about with wonder, she takes delight in learning the simplest of things, yet when she speaks she has something of a wiser understanding about her, and I wonder if her clownish innocence isn't something more calculated, perhaps because it is only through this approach that she feels safe enough to interact with the world. But then maybe this is the tragedy of the characters, as they cannot quite reconcile their outward persona with something more sensitive inside; amorphous and flickering between two states. The Fool, who we later meet, played with wonderful exuberance and passion by Richard Baseheart, is the classic fool, who comically strides around at mocks people at his leisure, often cruelly, which is ultimately his downfall, but beneath that is a wisdom and understanding that he rarely shares. "I don't know for what this pebble is useful but it must be useful. For if it's useless, everything is useless. So are the stars!" He encourages Gelsomina to understand her own potential as a person, and is the one perceptive enough to recognise the bond between her and Zampanò. But Zampanò is the final tragedy, a brute with a love he could not begin to articulate or even recognise, and when he finally breaks down and cries on the beach, a place which seems like the end of the world, it hurts because like the other characters he understands when it is already too late, and now there is no more road left on which to travel.