The year before he entered the seminary, the young man who would become Pope Francis went to see a movie. That film, Federico Fellini’s “La Strada” (1954), moved him deeply and became his favorite movie of all time. Last year, dressed in papal white, Francis recorded a video celebrating the film’s 70th anniversary. “As a boy, I watched many of Fellini’s films, but ‘La Strada’ has stayed in my heart,” he said. Throughout his papacy he referenced it in homilies, interviews and public addresses.
It’s no surprise that it had such an impact on him: “La Strada” (“The Road”) has a luminous compassion for the least among us, and pays witness to the power of love in a violent world. The film centers on Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife and frequent collaborator), a “simple-minded” young woman who is sold by her impoverished family to Zampano (Anthony Quinn), a traveling carnival strongman. Zampano is a violent, womanizing drunkard, but Gelsomina—foolish in a way that makes her totally innocent—loves him anyway.
With “La Strada,” Fellini began to break away from Italian neorealist style and to experiment with the more fantastical (and often circus-inspired) style that marks his later works. Despite the gritty setting and cinematography, we should engage with it on the level of parable, not documentary. Gelsomina is not meant to be a realistic portrayal of a person with a developmental disability. Her “simple-mindedness” is more spiritual than psychological. Although she suffers abuse and deprivation, she continues to view the world with a childlike sense of joy and wonder (heightened by Masina’s brilliant, Chaplin-inspired performance).
While Zampano performs at a manor house wedding, children lead her to the room of their bedridden cousin. It appears that they have brought her here as a joke, to tease or perhaps frighten the sick boy. Instead, Gelsomina looks at him with a sort of tender awe. That’s how she sees everything: life and people are cruel, but she keeps finding joy. Zampano considers this stupidity; anyone who knows Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians would recognize it as a kind of holiness.
Italian neorealist cinema, which often focused on the marginalized, has what Martin Scorsese called a Franciscan element: “compassion for every living being.” That includes people often discarded by society: people like Gelsomina, or the various children, traveling entertainers and hard-luck cases she encounters on the road. The film even has deep empathy for the monstrous Zampano.
Core to the film is the idea that every life has worth. This is expressed best by Il Matto (“The Fool,” Richard Basehart), a clown Gelsomina meets in a traveling circus and one of the few characters to treat her kindly. In the film’s key scene he picks up a pebble from the street. “Everything in this world has a purpose,” he tells her. “Even this pebble, for example.” When Gelsomina wonders what that purpose is, Il Matto admits he doesn’t know. “But it must be for something. Because, if this is useless, then everything is useless: even the stars. And even you, you are also useful for something.”
Pope Francis used this image in his Easter Sunday homily in 2017: “And with faith in the Risen Christ, we too, pebbles on this earth of pain, tragedy, acquire meaning amid so many calamities.” It’s telling that “La Strada” was on his mind while celebrating the Resurrection.
Gelsomina takes the parable of the pebble to heart, and decides to stay with Zampano, believing that her purpose in life is to love him, since no one else will. During a visit to a convent, a sister suggests that Gelsomina’s itinerant lifestyle is similar to the sisters’ detachment from the world, underlining Gelsomina’s sense of vocation. But the film, like so many love stories, ends in tragedy with Il Matto and Gelsomina dead, and Zampano drunk and alone on an empty beach.
Still, a deep, belated change has happened in Zampano’s heart because of his time with Gelsomina. At a gathering of traveling performers in 2016 Pope Francis referred to Gelsomina: “with her humility, her itinerant work of beauty, [she] managed to soften the hardened heart of a man who had forgotten how to cry. She did not know it, but she sowed! You sow this seed: the seeds that do so much good to so many people who perhaps you will never know.”
“La Strada” is a film of inversions. Zampano, the strongman, is the weakest character in the film, ruled by his appetites and insecurities. Meanwhile, it is the fools, Gelsomina and Il Matto, who most deserve to be taken seriously. “La Strada” reminds us, just as Pope Francis did throughout his papacy, that we must look in unexpected places for light and guidance. In a world as broken as ours, the things that matter the most are the things that are valued least: faith, hope and love. To be holy in this world, you have to be a little foolish.
“La Strada” is streaming on Max, the Criterion Channel and Kanopy.
