Nights of Cabiria (1957)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Nights of Cabiria (1957) – F. Fellini

My Fellini period was decades ago, in the 1990s; so revisiting Nights of Cabiria felt almost like seeing a new film.  Yet, Fellini’s early style, mixing (Italian) neo-realism with something more personal, poetic, episodic, remained familiar. This film belongs to Giulietta Masina (Fellini’s wife and muse) who plays Cabiria, a downtrodden prostitute with an indomitable spirit (she won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this performance). The arc of the film follows Cabiria (full circle?) from our first glimpse of her being pushed into a river (nearly drowning) by a seedy paramour only after her purse, through a series of encounters where we see other sides of her, sometimes disparaged but often her (not clichéd but perfectly acted) heart of gold shows through and invites warmer treatment, eventually from a gentle accountant (François Périer) who promises to take her away from the life. Emotions follow this same arc: bitter, melancholy, playful, amazed, despondent, resilient. Fellini started as a screenwriter and his talent shines here. The sets and locations, from squalor (older prostitutes living in caves) to astounding luxury (the film star’s mansion), allow Masina to act as the viewer’s emissary to unknown worlds, adding empathy and identification.  Is she looking for true love? Well, so are we.  After this, Fellini moved onto the decadence of La Dolce Vita.

La Chimera (2023)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

La Chimera (2023) – A. Rohrwacher

Director Alice Rohrwacher’s most recent feature and her first since her breakthrough with Happy as Lazzaro (2018).  (She seems to make a lot of shorts).  La Chimera feels very European (Rohrwacher is Italian), even if it stars British Josh O’Connor (he barely speaks and usually in broken Italian). Isabella Rossellini plays a matriarch (the mother of O’Connor’s lost girlfriend). As in Lazzaro, there’s a communal feel to the casting, with a lot of amateurs, possibly non-actors, in bit parts or just part of the gang. Is this Fellini-esque? Rohrwacher also seems to enjoy gazing at faces. The blurb at iMDb seems to position this as some sort of arthouse Indiana Jones but I have to tell you that even though O’Connor plays a sort of archeologist (or perhaps just a graverobber), this is not that (although there are some beautiful arthouse shots!). Instead of action, we get an elusive meditation on our connections to the past, both cultural (as in the hunt for artefacts or lost treasures) and personal (as in returning to one’s old haunts or dwelling in one’s thoughts about people who have passed). Not so much bringing the past to light in the present but perhaps escaping to the past, not necessarily but especially one’s own past, not an updated version? But that’s just one of the themes and ideas free-floating through the film. Rohrwacher again toys with magical realism with O’Connor also a sort of dowser for graves, overcome when near treasure-filled hollows in the ground. But how do these lost souls feel about giving up their riches?