Cinema
Instead of a Miracle
QUI,GLY
By ISAB,EL
Cabiria. (Cameo-Polytechnic.) Tun oddly named Cabiria of the film's title (director : Federico Fellini; X certificate) is a prostitute. But, whatever your tastes in sub- ject matter, this need not' put you off it. This is surely the first film about prostitutes that you could recommend 'to any adult, for it has the charm of Cabiria's Un- sophisticated good nature, and all the pathos, rather than the squalor, of her situation. Of her professional activities we see very little, anyway : just the windy corner where, in her working costume of tatty fur coat, ankle socks, and sandals (and, when it rains, waterproof hat with a hole in the back to let through the pony tail of Mir), she waits for customers, a tiny creature with surely the shortest legs in the film business, strolling arm in arm with her enormous friend (Franca Marzi), a fat but not ugly girl with a caricaturish resem- blance to Gina Lollobrigida, who towers a head or so above her. As far as Cabiria's livelihood goes, we are not invited to judge it on either a social or a personal level.
Cabiria is that odd thing in Italy, the small capitalist : on the fringes of Rome, those great stretches of soiled countryside that make one see what the term `waste land' can really mean, she has bought herself a square box of a house, and everything inside' its beaded doorway—wireless, gas-stove, furniture, canary—is paid for. And, just as the house sets her apart (so she feels) from the other girls on her beat, so the future holds, in her dreams, the impossible mirage of respectability : marriage, a home, and that essential ingredient of Italian happiness, the esteem of the neighbours. Unfounded dreaming (for Cabiria could no more appear respectable than she could fly) is very much an Italian characteristic; somehow, people feel, the impossible will some day arrive, like a foot- ball pool prize, to stun one. No good planning for it : faith is what makes miracles. And the film's whole point is that faith makes no miracles at all, but that the courage and perkiness, toughness and resilience that make it possible for Cabiria to go on believing in them are worth more, in the end, than any miracle. Time and time again Cabiria believes, and is disillusioned; and even when she gets her miraculous moment (being picked up by a handsome film star, and taken to his great Hollywood-style house) it only ends in a cold night on the bathroom floor to escape his jealous mistress. When at last a quiet, kind, forgiving and (to Cabiria) respectable-looking man (Francois Perier) asks her to marry him, she sells her house, takes her savings out of the bank, and joins him with about £450 in her handbag. Then, as they admire the sunset together from the edge of a cliff, something in his eyes warns her. Other men have tried to kill her for money, and she knows the signs. But nothing, not even that, can keep Cabiria down.
Fellini is the most interesting, director at present working in Italy; but Cahiria is too bitty, too anecdotal, at times too repetitive of past triumphs and past mannerisms, to rank with his best films. its triumph is one of performance rather than direction. Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, plays Cabiria so individually, even so eccentrically, that she never fails for a moment to convince one, almost painfully, of areal, rounded, solid Cabiria, with a past and a future, a house, a tatty fur coat, a gas-stove to swank about. Yet she is touching and comprehensible on the broadest human level, and language, idiom, conventions of speech or manner, are no barrier at all. Even if there were no sub-titles, her walk and gestures and eyes would speak for her enough : to .show, say, the spaniel-like tenderness with which she takes the film star's hand, and touches her cheek with it incredulously; or the horror with which she comes out of a hypnotic trance to find herself made a fool of in front of a jeering audience;' or the fuddled hopelessness with which she ends a Sun- day pilgrimage, realising that a sacred miracle is no more likely to hit her than a profane one. Comedy of this sort—tragi-clowning, teetering on the edge of the absurd—comes uneasily to most women. Giulietta Masina has the rare ruthlessness it takes; and, which is rarer, direction to justify it.
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