La strada: Beauty and the Beast

The film occasioned his ascent to stardom throughout the world and burned itself into the collective mind’s eye, also making Fellini’s lead actor, and wife, Giulietta Masina, famous. Its success paved the way to a future in which an entire lexicon was invented for the director; new releases would be advertised with his name on the marquee, and Felliniesque became a part of the cinema vernacular. Nearly seventy years later, with countless plaudits and volumes devoted to the film and its maker, it still presents an invitation—or a challenge—to the viewer, asking us to place pat moral judgments to one side. La strada—in its poetry, its ambivalence, its durable tenderness—is evergreen.

As Gelsomina, Masina shifts moods infinitesimally in response to Zampanò’s cruelties, registering microexpressions of apprehension or delight, often evolving from moment to moment. The Chaplinesque nature of Masina’s aesthetic and performance was noted by numerous writers of the time, down to her oversize man’s coat and hat and her often bemused facial expressions. With her clown’s paint and overdrawn eyebrows, mouth corners pulling downward as though on marionette strings, Masina’s is a face that remains carved in the memory.

Although Fellini was an artist who would become associated with the serrated edge of sixties glamour—and whose films La dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963) would be so specific to their time and place—Fellini’s setting for La strada is curiously timeless. It’s a work with a haunting, fablelike quality, a narrative that might as easily be about medieval jesters were it not for the intrusion of motorcycles and automobiles. Its floating sense of loose time, its gentle pans across the landscape as Gelsomina clowns and entertains local children, all feel a world apart from modernity.

For his part, Fellini was pleasantly surprised by the adoration for his film in the U.S. He won the first-ever Best Foreign-Language Oscar in 1957 for La strada, cementing the movie’s status as a must-see and guaranteeing it periodic reissues and long runs at repertory cinemas well into the sixties.

“When I was in the States with [Masina] after La strada,” Fellini later said, “people didn’t know whether to smile at her or kiss the hem of her garment. They saw her as someone halfway between Saint Rita and Mickey Mouse.” Even Walt Disney himself wanted to turn the enigmatic Gelsomina into animation, a surefire gold mine for Fellini that he emphatically resisted.

Two years earlier, La strada’s reception in Italy had not been quite so warm. Instead, it became a critical and political flash point in what scholar Peter Bondanella calls the “crisis of neorealism.” Although the film’s flea-bitten, itinerant setting, populated by convincingly down-and-out working-class Italians, would appear to match the movement’s aesthetic, many Marxist critics felt the film did not sufficiently engage with the neorealist movement’s ideological aims. The film was too poetic; too suffused with old religious themes; too individualist. Guido Aristarco, an influential Italian Marxist film critic, called La strada’s ideology “wrong.” He seems to have confused the movie for a math problem, and judged it as such. 

To a modern viewer, the “crisis of neorealism” critique may feel like simply a product of its time and place. Today, La strada’s greatness probably seems to many as self-evident as Fellini’s own. And yet, as ever, there are still those with Fellini hesitancy. In general, the director’s popularity—and La strada’s—has trended downward among the critical establishment, if certain “greatest films” polls are to be believed. A long-overdue negotiation to upend and reconsider the traditional film canon—in which Fellini and his work have loomed large for many years—may be part of the cause. Among some younger cinephiles, Fellini has gained a reputation as a daunting canonical filmmaker with the flavor of a chauvinistic worldview.

I also wonder if contemporary viewers and critics inclined toward psychological realism may balk at Gelsomina’s continued willingness to martyr herself, her almost bovine acceptance of abuse and debasement, and her dogged loyalty to Zampanò, which veers into self-annihilation. One might argue that Fellini’s woman-as-spiritual-savior trope feels dated, gendered in all the old, bad ways. But Fellini’s is not a cinema of the literal or logical; it is one of magic, of tricks, and of allegory. It’s crucial not to lose sight of the director’s consistent application of symbolism and myth to each of his characters in turn. Just as Masina plays a broad type, so, too, does Quinn, as an abominable exaggeration of men’s lesser qualities.

Gelsomina, a creature of luminous simplicity, suffers as though she was born to do so. And in the spiritual sense, that may be true; her suffering is purifying. There is no delusional rationalizing of an abused woman, no justification; she knows Zampanò cannot love her, that even his tiny slippages of kindness must inevitably be followed by another act of savagery. She loves him not despite his being a monster but because he is one. She may be victimized, but she is not pathetic; her self-awareness is what makes the distinction.

“It makes no difference. I’m of no use to anybody, and I’m sick of living,” says Gelsomina to the Fool. She finds her purpose in caring for the impossible brute, but eventually she must give in to the vagaries of this choice. Gelsomina has retained her loyalty in part because of the Fool’s parable, and his seemingly absurd advice to her. As she tells Zampanò, “I wanted to run away, but he told me to stay with you,” hinting at the fact that any prescribed wisdom she has been given is also laced with its own sort of severity. Late in the film, when a stranger recounts her death to Zampanò, the story seems to be less that she has died from exposure to the elements than from exposure to the masochism that the Fool encouraged in her, and to the final indignity of Zampanò’s abandonment.

And it is Zampanò—more than once throughout the film referred to as a beast or an animal—whom Fellini leaves us with in the finale, forcing the audience to ruminate on his potential for redemption as he slumps drunkenly on a beach, his large frame limp, seeming to want the sand to swallow him. In Quinn’s archetype of quick-tempered machismo, and in Zampanò’s final capacity to shed tears for his abandonment of Gelsomina, we may be seeing Fellini’s own self-reproach. (The director was a noted adulterer, after all, and said he could identify with Zampanò.) This would hardly be the director’s last cinematic expression of guilt.

Compare and contrast this anguish with the nearly beatific face of Masina in the last images of her, with her shorn hair and huddled posture. Gelsomina may look tiny and impotent beside the mountain of a man she is bound to, but there’s a certain peacefulness about her. “If I don’t stay with you, who will?” she repeats as a refrain. In Gelsomina, we see a woman who asks us, across the chasm of more than half a century, what moral absolutism achieves.