La Strada
So, it’s been awhile since I have blogged, and I am now finally using the newest WordPress, version 2.7 to be exact. My my, everything has changed so much, it looks even more Web 2.0 than before. Not that I am complaining… In fact, blogging less recently makes me realize how much fun it is to do so!
Actually one can clearly think Fellini’s transition from his roots as neorealist director towards the surrealism he is famous for; even I can see this, who only has watched “Roma” from his later works and the beginning “Roma, città aperta”, the only italian neorealist movie I have ever encountered so far.
How should I put it? Well, the realism in the movie is pretty clear: The characters in themselves are extremely realistic, their tragic story is very similar to most other realistic movies and books and the movie barely has any special effects. However, I think that “La Strada” rather feels like a fairy tale, an “unfinished poem” as some critic said according to Wikipedia. If people describe the movie, they rather use the vocabulary of mythology and the unreal rather than praise how realistic the story is. In fact, “La Strada” doesn’t really reflect our world, it’s not about stating an example of average people’s lives but only seems to want to tell a story – and oh, how subtly emotional that story is.
I think Gelsomina is a truly unique character in film, represented by a brilliant actress (who, of course, I have never heard of before). I love her facial expressions, her way of speaking (or rather, or not speaking) and especially the way she moves. She truly is “strangely beautiful” in some ways: She’s not sexy in any way, not smart, not even moe at all! Instead, she represents the beauty of innocence and child-like optimism like I have never seen before. In many ways, she’s quite similar to Lennie from “Of Mice and Men” (just thinking of the book makes me want to cry) and Myshkin from “The Idiot”, and I think she met her end in a similarly tragic way. However, as I have mentioned before, most her unhappiness stems from the faults of one (atrocious) person while Myshkin and Lennie have suffered under the intolerance of society in a much greater level. Compared to that, people have been surprisingly nice towards Gelsomina: It’s herself and Zampanò who did not truly want any help.
It’s also funny how I have read all the plot summaries of the Wikipedias (english, german and french) and saw how they differ greatly, but are all correct in some ways. I actually didn’t feel spoiled at all by reading them, because the summaries were so vague that they barely told you anything about what mattered to me – how Gelsomina met Il Matto, what her and Zampanò’s relationship really looked like, how she suffered under his skirt-hunting, how she tried to run away from him etc. etc.
All in all, this movie did actually not make me cry, but left me in awe for the delicate, subtle and absolutely brilliant storytelling. It makes Fellini one of these other directors that I want to see more of. This is my current list:
– La dolce vita
– 8 1/2
– Amarcord
– Variety Lights
– City of Women
– Juliet of the Spirits
– Satyricon
– Casanova
– Nights of Cabiria