Federico Fellini’s best films have a rambling, improvisatory feel
about them, as though the director were thinking out loud and letting
his camera roam, sniffing out truth in body language, evening lighting,
and improbably evocative reverse tracking shots. (No one bids farewell
to an image quite like Fellini.) In works like 8 ½,
Fellini Roma, and I Vitelloni, he filled his frames with
freaks, geeks, and tiny vignettes of varying tones and expressive
impact while his talents as a cinematic memoirist refined and redefined
ideas about personal cinema.
What’s strange about Fellini is that two of his most well-known
works, La Dolce Vita and La Strada, are two of his worst.
La Strada in particular is altogether too schematic, obvious,
and dull to rank among Fellini’s supplest work. It’s a road movie about
a traveling strong man (grunting, growling Anthony Quinn) who buys a
female sidekick (Giulietta Masina) to accompany him on his travels
throughout post-WWII Italy, but it’s also about such dubious ideas as
the healing power of laughter and the cosmic significance of a
pebble.
Masina’s, um, enthusiastic performance is usually cited as
Chaplinesque, but anyone who admires the Little Tramp will struggle to
see any connection between Chaplin and the rubber-faced, asexual idiocy
on display here. Something surfaces now and then about brutes who lack
compassion and the simpletons who love them, but even an admirer like
Martin Scorsese has checked his praise, saying of La Strada‘s
life-is-a-carnival mood, “I don’t like the circus. I have problems with
it.”
