La Strada (104 mins, PG)
Directed by Federico Fellini
Starring Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart
Having played a key role in the politically charged neo-realist movement (most especially as co-screenwriter in Open City and Paisa), Federico Fellini led the Italian cinema into a new postwar phase in the mid-1950s with films of poetic desolation whose marginal characters are the victims of themselves and each other rather than of society. In 1960, with La Dolce Vita, he launched an exhilarating kind of extravagant, fantastical cinema celebrating and satirising Italy's new prosperity.
Of those middle-period pictures from the 1950s, three of which starred his wife Giulietta Masina, the most enduringly popular (though not, in my view, the best) is La Strada (1954). It's now reissued in a new print that does justice to cinematographer Otello Martelli's monochrome images of bleak, snow-covered mountain roads, empty beaches, half-built suburbs, crumbling small towns, lonely farms on the horizons of endless plains.
Across this emotionally charged landscape, the brutal, insensitive strong man Zampano (Anthony Quinn) and his simple, abused assistant Gelsomina (Masina) make their way to the haunting music of Nino Rota, a theme we can no more get out of our minds than the film's characters can. The pair journey from village to village in a rickety van, performing for small crowds, passing the hat round, moving on and sleeping rough. They split up, are reunited, meet the mocking, philosophical highwire artist Il Matto (Richard Basehart) who becomes Zampano's deadly rival, join a shabby circus, have a touching sojourn at a rural convent.
It's almost unbearably poignant, and has a strong resemblance to Waiting for Godot, which was first performed in Paris while Fellini was shooting his film. Together with Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, La Strada laid the foundations for the road movie, the spiritual journey through time and space, though of course as a literary form its roots lie in the Middle Ages. There is something dubious about Fellini's attitude towards the characters of his later films, but he truly loves the people here and persuades us to join him.
