Before Federico Fellini became the audacious and surrealistic film auteur of the 1960s he was a lauded and accomplished Italian Neorealistic film director of the 1950s, more in league with Vittorio De Sica and Lucchino Visconti. No film better represents this era of Fellini’s art than his sterling 1957 film Nights Of Cabiria (Le Notti Di Cabiria), written by Fellini, Tulio Pinelli, and Ennio Flaiano (with Pier Paolo Pasolini scripting the Roman street slang), and starring his wife Giulieta Masina. It won the 1957 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and deservedly so.
The film deals with the trials and tribulations of the impoverished and downtrodden in a humorous but realistic way that Hollywood still does not dare to do. Yet, even in this film, one can see the filmmaker that Fellini was to become in a few years, for, despite its seeming realism, there are many neat touches of Absurdism, Symbolism, and Surrealism.
The film opens up with as symbolic a scene as could be. Cabiria (Masina’s character’s street name — her real name is Maria) is an aging prostitute who wears worn animal furs and outdated bobby sox with her shoes, and lives in a concrete box hovel in a semi-rural part of the Roman suburbs that has a definite post-war wasteland feel still to it, as if it has yet to recover from the devastation of the Second World War. She is on a jaunt by the river with her lover, Giorgio. All seems out of a storybook, or Hollywood film, until he snatches her purse and pushes her into the river to drown. The act comes out of nowhere, and so early in the film that it is astonishing.
Several small boys and some older local men rescue her and revive her by turning her upside down until the water comes out of her. Cabiria is embarrassed and doesn’t even thank her rescuers. She instead asks of Giorgio, refusing to believe he "done her wrong", and fearing he ran away scared. It is pure rationalization, but it foreshadows the end of the film. After getting over her "betrayal" by Giorgio, Cabiria hangs out with her hooker and biker friends, such as Wanda (Franca Marzi), although most are much younger than her, in a place that seems like something out of a James Dean film. When Cabiria rails that she cannot believe Giorgio would try to drown her for forty thousand lira, the much wiser Wanda says "They’d [meaning men] do it for five thousand." Life goes on.
On her peregrinations, Cabiria ends up outside a restaurant one night, where she meets a film star, Alberto Lazzari (a play off his real name, Amadeo Nazzari, then a huge Italian film star), whose blond bimbo girlfriend, Jessie (Dorian Gray), has dumped him. He takes Cabiria to a fancy nightclub, where she dances up a storm, despite the looks of others, sophisticates who view her as an Eliza Doolittle type.
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