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The road of magical neo-realism is a lopsided one, a cosmic allegory brought to a harsh Laurel and Hardy sketch: "Che faccia buffa che hai!" Seaside views bookend the fable, the peasant girl who "just came out a little strange" is named Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) and sold off to Zampano (Anthony Quinn), the brutish saltimbanque who suggests a troglodyte Pulcinella. The mismatched couple is a natural for a muscleman and clown act, he faces a paltry audience with a trick (chains snapped by "lungs of steel") while she provides off-key drums in black bowler and oversized coat. An air of quotidian enchantment hangs over the Italian countryside, a rowdy wedding banquet outdoors gives way to a mysterious glimpse of an unsmiling boy deep within a convent. Street activity shifts rapidly from the appearance of a trio of uniformed musicians to a surging religious procession to a tightrope act, where Il Matto (Richard Basehart) makes his entrance. In the rubble of a departing Roman circus, between the pebble and the moon, a vagabond philosophy laid bare: "You may not believe it, but everything in the world has a purpose." Memories of Griffith, Vigo and Harry Langdon abound in Federico Fellini's famed tragicommedia, the archetypal protagonists repeatedly meet and part like the chafing heads of a fanciful chimera. The manhandled naïf and the lumbering lout aboard the motorcycle-wagon comprise the central condition, an eternal tangle of elfin spirit and lumpish body until the quizzical trickster with glued-on angelic wings teases life one time too many. Nino Rota's melody embodies the parable's plaintive unrest, variously hummed, played on a tiny fiddle, and blown into a forlorn cornet before it comes crashing down during the palooka's flash of epiphanic horror. Quite the patch of pathos, a voyage about obvious and hidden beauty, a turning point for an artist increasingly beguiled by private mythologies. Eastwood (Bronco Billy) and Allen (Sweet and Lowdown) have their own versions. Cinematography by Otello Martelli. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |