Wednesday, June 27, 2012

%(*^ing Clowns!

Film: La Strada (The Road)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I don’t like clowns. I don’t have the typical phobia of clowns that a lot of people have—I’m not scared of them; I just don’t like them. I’ve thought about it and I determined a few years ago that the reason I don’t like clowns is pretty simple. Clowns are crazy. They’re like socially approved crazy people who have license to do whatever they like at any moment. On those very rare occasions when I am approached by a clown, I don’t know how to react because I don’t know what’s going to happen. I could easily get smacked in the face with a fish or doused in confetti or kicked lightly in the ass. All I really know is that I don’t want any of those things to happen, so I want the clown to go away from me.

Fellini’s La Strada (The Road) takes place in a circus in no small part and features a number of clown-like characters, so it showed up with one strike against it. Fellini is a director I feel like I’m supposed to like, that if I don’t like one of his films, there’s something wrong with me rather than the movie. But…clowns and a circus. I watched it anyway, but this is a film I probably would have avoided forever had it not been on The List.

Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) lives in poverty. Her sister had been sold by her mother to a man named Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who is a traveling performer. The sister has died, though, so the mother sells Gelsomina to him as well for the tidy sum of 10,000 lire. Off she goes with her new master. Zampano’s act is an odd one—he wraps a chain around himself and then breaks it with his chest muscles, and then passes the hat to earn his living. Gelsomina’s job is to drum up business—literally. She plays a trumpet and bangs a drum and performs little comedy skits in mime makeup.

Zampano, of course, is cruel, and needlessly so. Gelsomina is happy to be away from the crushing poverty of her home in exchange for the not-quite-as-crushing poverty on the road. She is a naïve and completely without guile or pretense. This doesn’t stop Zampano from treating her cruelly and beating her for even the smallest infraction or the tiniest misstep outside of his will.

Eventually, she rebels and runs away. While away from her cruel master, she encounters Il Matto (Richard Basehart), a clown and acrobat. She’s entranced with his performance, but is dragged away when Zampano finds her. Shortly after this, she and Zampano join a traveling circus that happens to employ Il Matto as well. Il Matto and Zampano do not get on well, mostly because the clown can’t help but make fun of the strongman at every opportunity, even heckling him a little bit during Zampano’s act. Naturally, this comes to blows and the two are briefly incarcerated. Il Matto is released first and tries to get Gelsomina to leave with him, but she refuses. Instead, she waits for Zampano outside the prison until he is released and they resume their life on the road.

Of course, they’re going to encounter Il Matto again, and of course it will get nasty and violent, an incident that sets up the third and final act of the film. Because La Strada is considered a classic, I won’t do it the injustice of spoiling it here, even under a spoiler tag. Suffice it to say that there’s tragedy aplenty in the final half hour.

This is one of those films that leaves me in something of a quandary. It’s an impossible film to dislike, even when I admit that Fellini is hit-or-miss for me (Satyricon was not a pleasant experience for me). It’s a classic story of innocence and evil that manages to avoid dropping into melodrama even though the story very much seems primed for it. Zampano is so purely nasty that he feels like a melodramatic victim, but he’s too much of a brute to be anything more than what he is. In his own way, he is as tragic as everyone else in the film.

But there is something incredibly off-putting about Gelsomina to me. She’s too much of a naïve character for me to take her terribly seriously. She doesn’t have the self-preservation skills of a brain damaged lemming, and seems to accept everything thrown at her with a goofy look and a head tilt like a puppy. The dubbing also leaves something to be desired. Richard Basehart has been dubbed by someone who has decided to inflict a manic giggle into virtually every line of dialogue.

So I’m torn. It’s a powerful story well told, but there is a part of me that holds it at arm’s length. I’m willing to be compelled by it, but simply find myself unable to be truly captivated by it. In their own ways, the characters are too flat, even when given small human touches. There’s too much attempting to capture a magic that isn’t there. Il Matto’s speech about the meaning of a small pebble, for instance, seems in many ways to be the moral heart of the film, but it seems to be so poorly thought through by the character that it elicited from me nothing more than a mental shrug.

I can’t fault the film for what it is. I can only fault my own particular likes and dislikes for not loving La Strada the way I feel I was supposed to. I blame it on the damn clowns.

Why to watch La Strada: It’s one of Fellini’s most important works.
Why not to watch: Clowns are made of evil.

19 comments:

  1. I don't necessarily think it's the damn clowns. I liked this movie, but I didn't love it. Fellini is a little troubling for me; I feel like, as a film fan, I'm *supposed* to love him. But I don't. And that makes me feel oddly guilty.

    She doesn’t have the self-preservation skills of a brain damaged lemming

    Hee hee hee...

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    1. I feel the exact same way. I appreciate what he does (except for Satyricon), but I don't fall in love with it the way I feel I should. We need to start deciding that it's his fault and not ours, I think.

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    2. Agreed. We should make a club. Fellini Ambivalence Anonymous.

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    3. Screw anonymous. My name is Steve and I don't care much for Fellini.

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    4. Another non-Fellini fan here. I think by now I've seen ten of his films and only liked one. And that was "Ginger and Fred". And I probably don't even really like that now anyway.

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    5. So now we need officers and a mission statement, and we're all set.

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    6. The only Fellini film that I've truly liked a lot is Nights of Cabiria. All the others I have seen I could take or leave, and a couple I actively disliked.

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  2. Fellini's films are circus and clowns,so it seems he won't be one of your fave directors.If this film did not get you,try his Nights of Cabiria,just don't lose faith in him.

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    1. I've seen Nights of Cabiria. That and Amarcord are why I haven't given up on Fellini entirely.

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  3. There is a time in everyone's life when you feel the urge to appear more intellectual than you actually are. You plunge into things you have no idea about and then pretend that you love them since all the cool guys do that. I haven't seen this film, but in the lack of access to it I once saw a pantomim play based on it, by some avant-garde group. It was ridiculously bad. I was 16 or 17 and pretended I loved it. I'm so glad I'm past that stage in my life. I'm so glad to be where I am, free to love anything from obscure to a mega success blockbuster film. Not because someone expects me to, but out of my free will.

    I hate clowns too. And I will never, ever watch this film.

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    1. So everyone goes through that phase? That period of life in which finding something obscure = credibility?

      But, yeah--I know what you're getting at, and I'm with you. I like what I like and damn the consequences or the sidelong stares of others.

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  4. Fantastic piece, Steve. I've somehow gotten this far without ever seeing a Fellini film -- so many Japanese monster movies, so little time -- and it sounds like I'm not missing much.

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    1. I wouldn't write him off completely. I think he's important for who he is and the influence he had, but I think you can also get a lot of his importance by looking at the people he influenced.

      Nights of Cabiria is really good, though.

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  5. I don't have anything against clowns, but on a (somewhat) related note, the presentation of Gelsomina reminded me so much of Harpo Marx (almost silent, funny hat, goofy faces) that I couldn't get the image out of my head no matter what I did. It meant I just couldn't take this movie seriously because I kept seeing all these things happen to Harpo Marx.

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    1. Harpo Marx is a great call! Now I'm going to see her like that, too. I wonder if that was intentional on her/Fellini's part.

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  6. A friend told be if she could meet a celebrity in heaven from the world of film, Giulietta Masina would be her choice. Fellini is a director that has grown on me. I guess tough to love La Strada, if you don't like clowns...

    Nights of Cabiria (1957) is my favorite by Fellini

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    1. I think the consensus from everyone, including me, is that Nights of Cabiria is a Fellini high point.

      I'd really like to like Giulietta Masina more than I do. I want to like her, but she always seems to be in the role of a naive, and so I also end up wanting to shake her violently.

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  7. I am signing on to your club, Steve, and I am very happy that I am not the only one with difficulty seeing the greatness in this movie. The frustrating thing is that you see all the acclaim the movie got and how everybody seem to love it and I just do not understand why. Now I know it is not just me who have this problem.

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    1. I think everyone has a couple of films like that. For me, La Strada is one of those that everyone seems to love but me, and evidently you.

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