Nights of Cabiria
Le notti di Cabiria
Federico Fellini (1957)
Giulietta Masina has been called ‘the female Chaplin’ – high praise that gives a hint of why I don’t like watching her. Although she’s remarkable both physically and vocally, her acting seems to me tautologous. Screen actors normally deploy a combination of movement, gesture, facial expression and voice to create a character. Masina’s use of the first three is such that she’s completed the job before she opens her mouth. She suggests a silent-movie star for whom the advent of sound, rather than encouraging a rethinking and refinement of physical technique, meant just another string to their bow. Masina’s most famous roles are in two of the most famous films made by her husband Federico Fellini, both from the mid-1950s. In La Strada (1954), she is the naïve, childlike Gelsomina, whose ill-treatment at the hands of the travelling entertainer Zampanò does nothing to sour her sweet nature. In Nights of Cabiria, she’s the title character, a prostitute who gets a repeatedly raw deal from life but keeps coming back for more.
It’s essential to the story (by Fellini, with assistance from Pier Paolo Pasolini among others) that Cabiria has been working the streets of suburban Rome for years and Masina, in her mid-thirties at the time, doesn’t look young – one of several positives she brings to the part. Others include a defiant walk (nearly a march) and a voice that’s surprisingly harsh and strong. From the opening scene, she is, though, intensely camera-aware. Cabiria and her boyfriend Giorgio (Franco Fabrizi) run across a meadow, pausing to embrace. As pint-sized Cabiria reaches up to kiss Giorgio, she stands on one leg and bends her other knee behind her. It’s a small movement but a typically posey one on Masina’s part. When, a bit later, Cabiria and the film star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari) dance a mamba in a night club, the great height (and breadth) difference between them is genuinely funny until Masina goes into a dynamic, high-speed solo. It’s undeniably eyecatching but the performer eclipses the character she’s playing.
The swanky night club and Lazzari’s apartment, where the next sequence takes place, are unusual locations in Nights of Cabiria. Most of the action is set in meaner streets of Rome, where life force is pandemic, most conspicuously in one of this celebrated movie’s most celebrated sequences. A procession venerating the Virgin Mary passes through the sex workers’ pitch into a neighbouring church and builds to grotesque mariolatrous hysteria. This culminates in a crippled man being persuaded to dispense with his crutches as proof that the Madonna has worked a miracle on him. He promptly falls to the ground. The scene needs a climax as melodramatic as this in order to stand out: where two or three are gathered together in this part of the world, things are always liable to get hysterical.
Approaching the end of the film, Cabiria is betrayed by another man, Oscar D’Onofrio (François Périer), for whom she has decided to give up her job and home in order to marry. Oscar takes her to woodland and, from there, up to the edge of a cliff. Suddenly terrified that he means to push her to her death, she throws down her bag – containing her life savings – and he makes off with it. (This rhymes with the first sequence: as they reach a river bank, Giorgio pushes Cabiria into the water and runs off with her purse.) The heroine’s first reaction is to lie on the ground, wailing that she wants to die. Within a few screen seconds, she’s back on her feet, rejoining the human race, as representatives of it walk along la strada back into town. They ooze love of life to such excess it’s a wonder they don’t bring on renewed thoughts of suicide. Instead, Cabiria smiles bravely through her tears.
She and Oscar first meet at a magician’s show, where exuberant locals are also in rowdy evidence until they obligingly go silent for the pivotal sequence in which the magician (Aldo Silvani) hypnotises Cabiria and she acts out the dreams she had, as an innocent eighteen-year-old, of a respectable married life. I found François Périer’s Oscar immediately creepy and didn’t get why Cabiria took such a liking to him or why he planned to do her wrong/in – except for purposes of narrative symmetry. Oscar isn’t even on the scene long enough for Fellini and Masina to build up much sense of lasting happiness now being within Cabiria’s grasp. As the title suggests, the structure of Nights of Cabiria is episodic. Oscar amounts to little more than another episode.
There are fine things in the film: the imposing Franca Marzi as Wanda, Cabiria’s friend and fellow streetwalker; the prostitutes’ hasty departure from their usual pick-up place at the sound of police car sirens – in the dark, they rush across a road and down a muddy slope. But the neo-realist bits are dominated by the existential fable. My main feeling leaving BFI was admiration for the skill of the people who reworked the material into the musical Sweet Charity. In Bob Fosse’s film, Charity’s heartbreak is close to heartbreaking; Oscar’s courtship and desertion of her are convincing. Dorothy Field’s lyrics for ‘The Rhythm of Life’ amusingly mock overdosing on joie de vivre (as well as religious consumerism) but Cy Coleman’s music, Sammy Davis’s singing and Fosse’s staging of the number combine to make you feel its seductiveness too. Whereas you want to run a mile from the emotional vitality that’s rampant in Nights of Cabiria.
22 August 2018