Director Federico Fellini with Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart

I was introduced to this by the first session on Italian neo-realism and won over by Masina’s face and expressiveness. Simple-minded girl is sold to a travelling strongman by her poor mother (some money + one less mouth to feed = what else can you do?). You’re in deepest material poverty from the very beginning. Zampano is a brute: Gelsomina’s sister had been sold to him previously and had died. For a brief moment at the start it seemed as if Gelsomina’s quirkiness might survive, but it is beaten out of her.

It’s a road movie (the clue’s in the title): from the opening shots of Gelsomina’s home by the sea to a life on the road, a brief escape (where she first meets the tightrope-walking Fool) then recapture and an interlude with the circus. A night in a convent, where she rejects the chance to stay, and then life just gets worse. Although it’s “realistic” in terms of its setting (you feel the cold, the hunger, the fear), in structure it’s more of a fable. Life hovers between the convent and the circus, the sacred and the profane. Zampano is a strongman – heavy, earthbound, daily breaking the chain about his chest and daily fastening it up again. The Fool is as light as air – a sprite, a spirit who tells Gelsomina that everyone has a purpose in life, however small. Thus she is persuaded that her purpose is to stay with Zampano rather than escape from him. Inner conviction trumps survival.

It ends by the sea once again – which makes me think of “Dover Beach”, and “fishers of men”, and connotations of the unknown and the feminine, and the final scene of “La Dolce Vita”. And then I wonder what I am missing, not having been brought a Roman Catholic in mid-century Italy with ubiquitous images of Christ on the cross and saints being martyred in grisly ways. And all those tropes by male authors of a woman suffering meekly, usually at the hands of men: it was there in “Tokyo Story”, “The Red Shoes”, Mouchette, Nancy and many other of Charles Dickens’s women, Fantine, “Breaking the Waves”, Isabel Archer, etc etc. What is that all about?

Our views on the film were divided. I increasingly thought it was brilliant. Others found it simply depressing – also a very valid point of view.