La Strada (1954)

*SPOILER FREE

Does everyone deserve compassion and sympathy, the good, the fool, and the bad? Who is everyone? Why is it easy for us to sympathize with the good, and hard with the bad, the cruel, and the wicked? Why is it always other people who are bad, cruel, and wicked, and not us? And how did we master the skill of justifying our own shortcomings, always, and never other people's, and what has shaped them this way? These are some of the questions that Federico Fellini's golden classic, La Strada, leaves you with.

La Strada is an Italian neorealist (like) drama following Gelsomina, a carefree, dreamy young woman and Zampano, a street performer and traveling entertainer, who buys her from her mother and takes her to help him on the road.

This is one of the most realist pictures by one of the most influential directors of all time, inspiring a generation of filmmakers and cinephiles - including myself, my favorite Italian filmmaker, Federico Fellini.

Anthony Quinn as Zampano, the strongman who lives in a caravan, who's enslaved by his anger and violence. Whose self-destructive nature, only through love and compassion, can it be liberated. And Giulietta Masina (Fallini's wife) as Gelsomina, the sweet and the naive, the innocent spirit that finds its way and smile despite the cruelty and abuse.

La Strada means the road, it's Fellini's metaphor for living, for life. This Fellini's celebration of life in the midst of its brutality and harshness. La Strada is beautiful and wistful, funny and confronting, a bittersweet carnival. The circus, "the road" of cinema.

The legendary music score was composed by, Fellini's regular collaborator, Nino Rota, my most favorite composer of all time besides Ennio Morricone. O MY HEART, DO ITALIANS DO IT BETTER! "One doesn't know if the images created the music, or the music created the images at a certain point." Martin Scorsese noted. Rota (who would go on for three decades after that creating timeless scores for the world's cinema including the eternal score of 'The Godfather I & II') and his music poetically symbolizes the people in the film, their struggles, and their innocence. Its main melancholic tune, and the film itself, had later on inspired a number of musicians including Bob Dylan and his poetic song "Mr. Tambourine Man".

La Strada won the the first-ever Oscar for best foreign language film in the year 1956. And Pope Francis named it as his favorite movie of all time.

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Available to watch on The Criterion Collection, and on Amazon Prime Video

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