Movie: Nights of Cabiria - Le notti di Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)
Casting Shirley MacLaine in Sweet Charity must have been one of the most self-evident decisions in Hollywood history. Nights of Cabiria plays like a Chaplin movie with MacLaine at her most irascible in the role of the Tramp, making the choice to turn its American remake into a lavishly produced Hollywood musical much more questionable. Nights of Cabiria, and Giulietta Masina's great perfromance in it, works so well because of its sparseness. Masina is free to overwhelm the screen with her incessantly earnest emotionality, without being distracted by anything that doesn't belong there. More importantly, her Cabiria's angry, proudly disagreaable attitude is a necessity, and an entirely understandable response to her surroundings. She lives in a traveller's encampment on the outskirts of Rome in a barely functional cabin that is still preferable to living in the surrounding caves. As a prostitute she's earned enough to be able to own her shelter, but still has to spend most of her life on the streets, where she is constantly exploited by men, both clients and not.
The film essentially presents several episodes in Cabiria's life that mostly follow the same pattern. Circumstances beyond her control create an opportunity for her to improve her financial or romantic prospects, she puts her entire being into trying to make the most of it, only for other circumstances beyond her control to put an end to her hopes and dreams, sometimes in deeply humiliating ways. Though Chaplin movies have similar structures, the Tramp usually responds to his misfortunes with an open-hearted, gracefully self--effacing, humanity, while Cabiria doesn't let ycu look away from her hurt, anger and irrationality while turning combative. In either case, both characters defiantly will not let life bring them down, whatever happens. For this reason, the ending doesn't entirely work for me. For the most part, whatever challenges Cabiria faces, they feel like they flow organically out of the film's milieu and its characters. That is not the case for Oscar's (Francois Perier) final act, that feels more like it is forced by Fellini to create the ultimate tragedy in which Cabiria is doomed forever in a perpetual cycle of misery, rather than as an honest expression of his feelings towards Cabiria.
The opening half hour however gives the impression that this is going to be one of the great masterpieces, with Fellini translating Masina's unpent energy and outlook to his depiction of the streets of Rome. The city is her workplace, but also a not entirely comprehensible world that exists outside her ordinary reality, where there is potential to burst in a spontaneous dance, meet the nouveau riche, and encounter foreign dancers from unknown corners of the the world. In these scenes Fellini integrates a sort of manic metatextual expressionism withiin the usual context of Italian neo-realism, giving a glimpse of how a 1950's Michael Mann movie could have looked like. After the visit to Alberto Lazzari's (Amedeo Nazzari, playing apprently a version of himself with a wonderful combination of sleaze and charm) extravagant villa, Fellini only ocassionally returns to this approach, settling for a more conventional style that still showcases why post-war Italian cinema has become so influential. Among other things, he keeps framing his characters against the backdrop of construction projects, railways and other symbols of Italy's rapid industrialisation during the 1950's/60s. It's a metter of time before the travellers' encampment will be replaced by apartment flats, but whether Cabiria will get to live in those is a whole other question.
No comments:
Post a Comment