The release of The Road, the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is nigh, chomping away at the time left to read it (at least while my head remains free of someone else’s translation.) I’ve had the book in my hands so many times only to be waved off by mood or the jaw-tightened, grave response of a good friend. Nothing like an impending Hollywood blockbuster to end this ignorance.
This a long preamble toward saying: Federico Fellini’s La Strada arrived here from the land of Netflix.
In the film, Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina, below) is sold by her mother to a traveling performer, Zampano (Anthony Quinn). The two set off on his wagon hitched to a motorcycle. Zampano performs his strong man act, striking Gelsomina until she bends to him. Gelsomina, while learning to accompany Zampano, barely learns to mask her pleasure and suffering. So we read the road in her: children in the film follow and lead her; music derails her; attachments form and break and break violently in her.
It may be the vacuum I’m in (a city lost, country roads gained), but Fellini’s road looms, here. Gelsomina’s scenes (like this one) remind me of the way I’m not initially inclined to face “daily the doom of that inevitable thumb / That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us.”
In contrast, Anthony Quinn’s character hulks in his ego, seeing little. He does something detestable, yet by the end I could watch him gnash at spumone in a seaside town, again and again.