Film: Nights Of Cabiria
Release date: 2nd March 2009
Certificate: PG
Running time: 114 mins
Director: Federico Fellini
Starring: Giulietta Masina, Giovanni Baghino, Loretta Capitoli, Francois Perier, Franca Marzi
Genre: Drama/Romance
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Italy/France
Following on from The White Sheik and La Strada, Fellini teams up again with his wife and muse Giulietta Masina in this Oscar-winning film, which marks a pivotal point in the director’s career.
The film is structured around the sporadic accounts of naive prostitute Cabiria who lives on the outskirts of Rome. In the opening scene, Cabiria and her lover Giorgio are running hand in hand along a riverbank outside the city. As she pauses by the river to enjoy the moment, Giorgio grabs Cabiria’s handbag and pushes her into the river. Dragged to safety by some boys playing nearby, Cabiria is shaken and sodden, but furious with her rescuers and determined to make her own way home. As she burns her thieving boyfriend’s belongings outside her shabby house, Cabiria promises herself she will never be a fool for love again.
Later that night, film star Alberto Lazarri picks Cabiria up off the street after a quarrelling with his glamorous girlfriend. Back at Alberto’s luxurious house, Cabiria enjoys her lavish surroundings, but is forced to hide when his girlfriend returns unexpectedly. Concealed in the bathroom, she watches with all too familiar disappointment as Alberto reconciles his relationship, and falls asleep slumped on the floor.
Dejected and lonely, Cabiria joins her friends on an impulsive pilgrimage to pray for abolition of her sins. Afterwards, she is devastated to find herself and her friends unchanged by their religious expedition.
Cabiria gets drunk and stumbles into a music hall performance at a seedy theatre, where she is plucked from the audience almost immediately by a smirking hypnotist. Onstage, Cabiria is hypnotised and believes she is a young girl in love, much to the cruel delight of the audience. Furious and humiliated, Cabiria flees from the theatre and straight into the path of mild mannered Oscar, and a doomed whirlwind romance ensues…
Nights Of Cabiria’s sporadic structure is ideally suited to its heroine’s tumultuous life; random encounters are played out in strange, haunting sequences which are at once authentically real and tinged with surrealism. In a famous sequence, Cabiria, abandoned at night by one of her clients, wanders though the darkening countryside outside of Rome. Here she meets a mysterious man who works through the night bringing food and comfort to impoverished people living inside caves in the hillside. This bizarre, dream-like sequence was originally cut by censors apparently affronted by its portrayal of charity independent of the church. Restored to the DVD edition, this sequence is a touching glimpse of the fate of the poor and neglected in society, indeed, living among the misfortunate is a formerly wealthy prostitute whom Cabiria is shocked to see living in such squalor. The anonymous man’s quiet charity contrasts starkly with the hysteria of the pilgrimage scene which follows it, a subtle reminder of Fellini’s aversion for the authority of the Church in Italian society.
Fellini fills his film with larger than life characters from the seedy underbelly of society (he enlisted Pier Palo Pasolini to advise him on the sleazier side of Roman life). These poor and marginalised characters are treated with a compassion that characterises his work. Although concerned primarily with the poverty stricken, there are hints of Fellini’s fascination with decadence which defined his later films. The film star’s lavish apartment, complete with marble staircases and tropical birds is contrasted starkly with Cabiria’s own shack on the fringe of the city. When Cabiria moves on, she sells her home to a downcast, poor family, far too large for the cramped dwelling. Like the waifs and strays forced to shelter in the hillside, these people are marginalised by society, and alienated by the creeping excesses of life in Rome.
Giulietta Masina is extraordinary in the central role, perfectly embodying Cabiria’s unbreakable joy de vivre. Branded the female Chaplin, Masina has a hugely expressive face which flickers seamlessly between pathos and comedy, betraying moments of devastating vulnerability beneath her exuberant swagger. She is a strangely childlike character, who flits rapidly between joy and rage. Like a child she makes rash decisions, quarrels relentlessly with her friends, and is fatally trusting of those around her.
It is not hard to see why the film attracted criticism on release for its odd, sometimes vaguely comical portrayal of prostitution. Indeed, Cabiria seems to spend more time arguing with her friends and going on dates than she does actually plying her trade. But Fellini was less concerned with exploring the grim realities of his subject matter than he was studying the strength of the human spirit. Perhaps the film is best viewed as fable; Cabiria is a symbol of hope, but she is also a very flawed, deeply human character, resilient, but completely unable to learn from her mistakes.
The final film from his Neo Realist period, Nights of Cabiria was Fellini’s last study of society’s outsiders before he turned his attention to decadence and glamour in sprawling art films like La Dolce Vita and 8½ .
Cabiria is perhaps the greatest outsider of Fellini’s work. Her misadventures provide both a subtle social commentary and a deeply affecting message about hope and emotional resilience. It is Giulietta Masina’s unforgettable performance; however, that really gives this film its tender heart. AM
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