The opening scene establishes the trajectory of Cabiria\u2019s life so far with almost no dialogue at all. She is first seen from afar, traipsing about the barren-looking countryside outside Rome and heedlessly embracing a young man who will soon steal her purse and push her into a nearby river. Her rescue is similarly humiliating, saved by a group of street kids and then held upside down by her ankles until the water she\u2019s swallowed gushes out. The boys are flummoxed as she runs away shouting the name of the man who wronged her until one of them explains, \u201cThat\u2019s Cabiria. She lives the life.\u201d This is his roundabout way of saying that she is, in modern parlance, a sex worker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like much of Fellini\u2019s work, Nights of Cabiria<\/em> is episodic in nature, though it lacks the colorful carnival feeling of later films like Amarcord<\/em> or Satyricon<\/em>, shot in a neorealist black and white and taking place, per the title, mostly after dark. Instead the director chooses to focus his camera on Masina\u2019s remarkably expressive face, as if he knows it\u2019s the most special effect the film has. Cabiria, n\u00e9e Maria, is a woman whose emotions, for better or worse, exist right on the surface. She falls easily and generously in love and dreams of the good life, but spends much of her time in the seedy underbelly of the city, beneath the bridges and along the riversides where her fellow street walkers conduct their transactions with clients, rain or shine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While Fellini flirts with the \u201chooker with a heart of gold\u201d narrative that would become more prominent in films like Trading Places<\/em> and Pretty Woman<\/em>, particularly in a brief interlude where Cabiria is picked up by a famous actor nursing a broken heart \u2013 she even gets her own \u201cBig mistake, huge\u201d moment \u2013 he never shies away from the more sordid aspects of her work: the interlude ends with her hiding in the actor\u2019s bathroom when his girlfriend returns, and sneaking out after the two have made love. There are scenes where the prostitutes get into cat fights or have to hide from the cops. While Cabiria is proud of the fact that she owns her house and doesn\u2019t answer to a pimp, her independence is still compromised just by the fact that she is a woman alone. Fellini often highlights this by emphasizing Masina\u2019s small, ballerina-in-a-music-box stature, and many of her evening encounters seem as likely to end in violence as business. Of all his characters, Fellini once said near the end of his career, he still worried about Cabiria. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither as painfully naive as Gelsomina in La Strada<\/em> nor as literally haunted as Juliet of the Spirits<\/em>, Cabiria does share with both of those women a certain wary optimism about their lives. She dances to her own tune, often to the clear disdain of those around her (and some critics, too; Bosley Crowther of the New York Times<\/em> called her outfit \u201cweird\u201d in his review), and there are shades of Chaplin\u2019s Little Tramp in her flair for physical comedy and elastic features. How much of all this is an act on Cabiria\u2019s part to keep her desperation at bay is an open question, one Masina\u2019s performance wisely never answers definitively. She\u2019s both fascinated and repulsed by charity. While her brash declarations to her friends that she\u2019ll soon be leaving town often fall on deaf ears, it\u2019s in her more unguarded moments of confession that the full extent of her longing becomes clear. In one of the few scenes that takes place in daylight, she goes with the other prostitutes to see the Madonna and make an offering. Among the teeming, sickly hordes, she begs the Virgin Mary to help guide her towards a better life, but becomes despondent when her friends immediately return to their old habits. \u201cWe haven\u2019t changed!\u201d she drunkenly wails. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A potential savior does appear, albeit nearly an hour and a half into the film, in the form of Oscar, an unassuming accountant who is in the audience when Cabiria is hypnotized during a magic act and cruelly induced into performing a mock courtship with an invisible man. She\u2019s dubious of his intentions, but allows herself to be swept up in the fantasy he offers, even one where the primary connection between the two lovers is their mutual loneliness. His belated introduction should be a tip-off to viewers, but Cabiria blinds herself to any warning signs, spontaneously selling her house and belongings for a marriage dowry and leaving town with him, as she\u2019s long vowed. By the time Oscar is leading her from a deserted wood to the edge of a cliff, the sinister echoes with the film\u2019s beginning become overwhelming. She begs him to kill her; he takes the money and runs instead. Cabiria is once more left alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or maybe not entirely. As she trudges back out to the road, she comes upon a group of teenagers in the midst of a carefree celebration, and is gradually enveloped in their merrymaking. \u201cBuona notte,\u201d one of them says to her, the final piece of dialogue in the film. A single black-streaked tear on her cheek, Cabiria looks directly into the camera, giving a soft nod to her audience, and to the man behind it as if to say, \u201cI\u2019ll be fine.\u201d Sixty-five years after its release, and twenty-eight years after Fellini and Masina passed away within five months of each other, Nights of Cabiria<\/em> stands as one of the great cinematic valentines from a husband to a wife \u2013 and a touching acknowledgment that loving someone, flaws and all, can be the role of a lifetime. “Nights of Cabiria” is available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/nights1-1024x705.jpg\")
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