DVD Review: La Strada - Page 4

Not only has Zampano literally killed his enemy, but Gelsomina’s sprit, as she slips into a depression that lasts weeks, for winter arrives, and the descent into coldness is a good metaphor for Gelsomina’s emotional anomie. She recovers a bit, as spring arrives, and Zampano even expresses regret for killing The Fool. But, seeing that there has been something irreparably wronged in her, he offers to take her back to her mother. She refuses, so he abandons her as she sleeps, and pushes his caravan silently away. We are not sure whether this is merely the cad in him, or his trying to spare her more of his own uncontrollable fury, but we suspect it’s the latter, as he covers her up with a blanket, leaves her some food and money, and even leaves her the trumpet she has desired playing throughout the whole film.

The final scenes take place at least four or five years later, for we see Zampano is part of another circus, with another female helper, but he is older, has more gray in his hair, and seems more ragged and tired. At the town the circus stops in, he overhears a woman singing a song while out hanging her wash. It is the famed theme song from the film, that started out as The Fool’s theme, became Gelsomina’s, and now has made it to the washerwoman. He asks her where she learned that tune, and she tells him a strange woman with a trumpet, who was there several years ago and died, used to play it. She was ill, simply withered away, and was buried by the town. Hearing this, we see Quinn act wonderfully without words, still the unemotive brute, yet trying to feel. He wanders away, goes through the motions of his tired old act of popping a chain with his chest’s expansion, and gets into a drunken brawl at a bar. The last scene of the film is silent, save for the theme song, now all Zampano’s, as he weeps helplessly on a beach at night.

While Fellini and Masina benefited the most from this film, the movie really is Quinn’s character’s tale. We see Zampano grow the most, learning a little of human feeling, while The Fool remains the flirty wiseass till his end, albeit veined with cruelty and spite, and Gelsomina never grows beyond her quirky self. That Quinn, by then a solidly bankable Hollywood star, would take on such a complex role, often acting with just grunts, body movements, and his eyes, in such a despicable character, shows the faith he had in the young Fellini — then directing only his fourth full film. His performance dominates the film. Masina is very good, as the eternally mugging and plastic-faced Gelsomina, but there is a lack of depth to her character, even as there is the suspicion she is never as naïve as she portrays. In a remake, Gelsomina would probably be declared bipolar, and zonked up on pills. The full range of Masina’s acting abilities would have to wait a few years till the older and more world-weary role she had in Nights Of Cabiria.

Article Author: Dan Schneider

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