So this is early Fellini — apparently his earlier work was Italian neo-realism, and this is his first movie going past that style; but it’s definitely not his mature style, either. La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 felt like movies by the same person. This… doesn’t, really. I mean, you can see it if you know it’s him, but it’s not really doing the same thing at all.

Because what you have here is kind of a road movie (“La Strada” is Italian for “the road”) as spiritual parable. In broad outline, an innocent woman joins up a brutish strongman and they travel from town to town as he does his act. She comes to fall in love with him, and then he semi-accidentally kills another dude, and it breaks her; he ends up abandoning her while she’s sleeping on the side of a road. Later, he finds out that she’s died, and he gets drunk and cries by the beach, which is the dramatic ending.

Apparently you can look at the characters as embodying traits like “the soul” and “the body” and so forth, and view this as a real allegorical type of thing, and/or as a tale of redemption. It’s spare enough that it doesn’t feel weird to do that, and also there’s a big circus motif running through it (she dresses in clown makeup a lot of the time), so it feels all quasi-symbolic anyway.

But the problem I have is the literal level. Because it actually feels less like Fellini and more like one of those French New Wave movies where a woman joins up with a shitty dude and falls in love with him for no reason whatsoever, and he keeps being relentlessly shitty, and it’s just impossible to understand why she’s putting up with it at all. Like, from minute one when they meet, the dude literally buys her from her mom (who is very poor, apparently) and OH BTW he also bought her older sister some years ago, and she’s dead now and how she died is never explained, so it’s like he went through one girl already and just came back to get the next girl up, which is SUPER CREEPY.

And it never gets better after that. He ignores her, leaves her to sit on street corners overnight, treats her with nothing but insults and derision… and she stays with him, even when she gets better offers from other people. It’s not until he literally murders someone that she starts to have a problem with him, and even then she refuses to leave and he has to abandon her to get rid of her.

These creepy-ass romances where an innocent woman tries to redeem a shit-ass dude are a total staple of mid-twencen movies, but whenever they form the core of the movie (as in L’Atalante, say), it’s hard for that movie to really work for me (and I assume any modern audience). So… not really super-great, but idk, it does have a certain kind of ethereal mood to it, which is something.