Oh my God, La Strada!

La Strada (The Road), considered to be one of Fellini's masterpieces, was on TV last night. Please click on the link to see Roger Ebert's review of La Strada, which gives both an excellent summary of the film and some good insight into Fellini's work.

I caught the tail end of the movie as I went downstairs last night to watch the tube and knit. It was surreal to see a film that my mother and grandmother both revered, and that I had not seen since I was a young teenager. I did not understand all the nuances of the film when I was young, but I was horrified even then at the treatment of Gelsomina, (the character played by Fellini's wife, Guilietta Masina), by Zampano (played by Anthony Quinn) who literally buys her from her mother to take her on the road with her as his assistant in his strongman act. The scenes of small Italian towns, roads full of rocks and dust, and the country and seaside locations made a deep impression on me. When this movie was showing on TV, my mother would announce it as if Christ were making an appearance: "La Strada's on tonight!" She would generally give a running commentary as we watched: "Now he's driven her crazy...Look, he's leaving her, all by herself...How does he expect her to take care of herself, crazy like that?...See, now he regrets what he did, and it's too late."

Though I was only able to watch a little of the movie last night, I can understand a bit more now of La Strada's appeal to my mother and grandmother: the waif-like woman abused by the man she belongs to (they're not married in the film, though Gelsomina is passed off as Zampano's wife). Gelsomina gets a couple of opportunities to escape, but she remains with a man who brutalizes and degrades her because she thinks she loves him (and then, of course, grows to fear him). Yet, in the end, Zampano has a breakdown on a cold, deserted beach, crying with remose as stark black-and-white waves roll in. Even though the movie is really over-the-top as only a Fellini movie can be, I came away from it deeply moved by the images and the acting, which affected me almost as much as when I was a kid.