MUBI

Fellini’s Oscar-winning international breakthrough, about the road life of a traveling strongman and his abused, idealistic assistant, so divisive when it was first released due to what Italian critics thought was an abandonment of the director’s neo-realist past, is today less of a political import in the history of Italian cinema than an aesthetic turning point for a director who never cared to hang his hat under one particular label. As Zampano, the animalistic strongman who travels from one country town to the next, spewing a hackneyed text while breaking a chain to a gawking audience, Anthony Quinn gives the best performance of his career (even dubbed into Italian on the preferred audio track), all brooding menace and ignorance, treating his bought for “wife” Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), who somehow grows an unreturned affection for the brute, like a dog to be trained; indeed, in one of the earliest, and saddest scenes in the film, he teaches her how to pronounce his name to an audience by whipping her with a switch. Fellini’s growing love for performance, ritual, a circus atmosphere, and the expressibility of faces (Masina’s sad clown makeup and Chaplin-esque resolve gives the film its heart) is at its most lovingly accessible here, at a point in his career where the familiar trappings of neo-realism were giving way to surrealism, poetic discourse, and an emphasis on human interaction rather than the effects of society and poverty on living conditions. Zampano and Gelsomina work for tips, but their economic situation isn’t Fellini’s focus point, he cares more for the relationship, the way in which each successive stop on their journey from one coast of Italy to another strengthens or divides the pair, and ultimately, how magic, love, and happiness struggle for survival in a barren, increasingly pessimistic post-war existence.