LA STRADA

"At that time, there was no autostrada between Rome and the north and so you had to drive through the mountains. Along one of the tortuous winding roads, he saw a man pulling a carretta, a sort of cart covered in tarpaulin ... A tiny woman was pushing the cart from behind. When he returned to Rome, he told me what he'd seen and his desire to narrate their hard lives on the road. 'It would make the ideal scenario for your next film,' he said. It was the same story I'd imagined but with a crucial difference: mine focused on a little traveling circus with a slow-witted young woman named Gelsomina. So we merged my flea-bitten circus characters with his smoky campfire mountain vagabonds."

I have quite a few reasons I wanted to watch this movie. David Lynch often sings Fellini’s praises as an amazing director, and according to the American Film Institute this movie is "one of the most influential films ever made,". It won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957, and placed fourth in the 1992 British Film Institute directors' list of cinema's top 10 films.

La strada ('"The Road"') is a 1954 Italian drama film directed by Federico Fellini from his own screenplay co-written with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. Free-spirited Gelsomina is sold to the surly traveling circus performer Zampanò as his assistant. Traveling from town to town to perform, a strange bond develops between the two as Gelsomina learns her purpose in life and Zampanò realizes too late his attachment to her.

Fellini's creative process for La Strada began with vague feelings, "a kind of tone," he said, "that lurked, which made me melancholy and gave me a diffused sense of guilt, like a shadow hanging over me. This feeling suggested two people who stay together, although it will be fatal, and they don't know why." These feelings evolved into certain images: snow silently falling on the ocean, various compositions of clouds, and a singing nightingale

It’s a pretty standard movie formula, take two characters who don’t get along, stick them together, and slowly watch as they start to deeply care for each other. Watching this movie for the first time, its hard to tell what tone they were going for. We open with a mother who is forced to sell one of her children to avoid poverty, and normally that would be a rather upsetting scene. But the wailing Italian Mother feels more ridiculous than upsetting, and once we get on the road this becomes a sort of buddy buddy comedy. Except our buddy Zampanò is abusive and extremely walled off emotionally, which makes this movie half heartwarming and half heart breaking. This movie doesn’t linger on any one mood more than the other, and it’s clear the director here is simply showing you what’s happening without persuading you to feel one way or another about the characters.

This movie is far to meandering for me to really fall in love with it, but its a damn good movie for those who don't mind really slow burns.

8/10