FEDERICO FELLINI’S NIGHTS OF CABIRIA “She musta slipped…”

 © 2014 by James Clark

      The first episode of Nights of Cabiria (1957) is a crime melodrama so offbeat it could almost be science fiction. We see in the middle distance a diminutive woman, in a white dress with horizontal black waves, zigging and zagging and shimmying backwards in bright sunlight across the nondescript scrub and debris land of the outskirts of Rome, in the throes of the money-mad developments of the post-War “Economic Miracle.” It is impossible not to be struck by the ebullience of her actions, showering affectionate playfulness upon a male friend in stylish shades not a party to her kinetic imperatives. They come to the Tiber and, like a one-track insect, he elbows her into its blazing current, not forgetting to come away with her purse which, just seconds before, she had twirled in a wide orbit. Though she was a player in good standing when it came to gracing terra firma, we immediately realize she’s a non-swimmer (her arms and hands describing graceful but nonetheless hapless arabesques into the river run which has all but swallowed for good the rest of her body). In a spirited effort she brings her head to light and screams for help. Children (one of them in a North American Indian headdress) playing along the river bank hear this and rush to do what they can to save her. One of them remarks, “If she gets to the sewer she won’t get up again!” (Hold that thought.) A well-dressed passer-by takes off his suit jacket and then, applying some of the rationality that took him this far, puts it back on and (after demanding an inventory of possible rescuers in the vicinity) cuts out. Less formally dressed men supplement the children’s efforts in diving into the menacing dynamics of the river and getting her to shore, by beginning to apply artificial respiration. As they hold her upside down (her spiffy shift now miserably soaked and dirty) and find reason to enthuse in her emitting water from her lungs and mouth, a woman standing nearby bites her fist (her face and eyes almost drowned in anxiety about the victim’s difficulties and prospects, but also in distress about a close encounter with death).

Coming to (in some manner), the small woman asks desperately, “Where’s Giorgio? Who does he think he is?” Pulling away from her rescuers, she announces, “I’m going home!” One of the kids cries out, “She’s got seven souls, like a cat!” The adults, however, are less impressed with her self-absorbed ingratitude. “You saved me. Now I wanna go home, OK?” During the frenzy of the woman overboard, a little boy surmised, “She musta slipped!” This film, as it happens, is all about slippage from a slippery integrity and about the full carnal complement involved in swimming along in dangerous waters. As she turns her back on those having evinced a comprehension of care for others which is seemingly far more robust than hers, someone fills in the group about her orbit—“She lives the life…” In one sense you could say, “So does everyone;” but the connotation of sex-trade night life which they all would immediately field makes the rounds as a rationale for her crude energy.

This being a Fellini composition (his writing team including the super-subtle [to the point of super-perversity] Pier Paolo Pasolini) we’re about to learn in what way our protagonist is not only hard as nails but also not hard enough. She makes it back to her pillbox-like house (a masterstroke of visual design) somewhere continuous with the range where she had the setback, and her colleague, Wanda (evincing right from the get-go more affectionate range than the one she identifies as Cabiria [a pseudonym bringing to mind fascist-era pseudo-classical-Roman nomenclature]), perseveres in face of Cabiria’s menacing bluster in the course of registering the rare point of light that dear Giorgio, her pimp, had been. Wanda states simply that her bedraggled neighbor had only known him for four weeks and that it was less than bright to trust him when he claimed to love her. “Why’d he do it? I gave him everything!” is the cat’s attempt to re-establish some viable logic.

An indication that she—for all her (when on) bright-as-a-button interpersonal exertions (with body language that carries us, along with her, to delight) through the heart of the narrative—has been close to drowning throughout comes in the final episode where she once again gets mugged (this time more civilly) and loses every cent she has earned, having sold her house to finance a supposed lifetime of love with a man who claims to work for the government, who is far more poetic than the shiftless Giorgio, but who constitutes a legion of heels in face of which her sanguine outlook offers no sensible defence. So we behold her, after a short period of prostration in the woods where she was robbed, being caught up in a procession of very young party goers on a country road. Soon their cordiality, music-making and pairing up induces in her a heartfelt smile shining through her desperation and misery. There is something so richly cogent capturing her devotion. And something so punishingly eluding her otherwise masterful equilibrium.

Nights of Cabiria is, even by Fellini standards, a startlingly impressive vein of winsome sensibility. It is within this physical powerhouse that we have to direct our scrutiny, in order to comprehend the hard to handle gift of discernment Fellini provides. After Cabiria’s unbalanced, violent rebuff to Wanda—“Mind your own fat ass… Who told you we were friends?”—we see her musing upon her semi-natural territory in twilight; and there we’re struck by some boys climbing a sketchy framework of metal poles (half-construction zone, half-circus). Their vaguely mysterious agility, flexibility and sense of balance stand in stark contrast to the pillbox and its owner. Soon after, the kids’ game becomes plodding around with pails over their head, in the flickering light of a bonfire. “The party’s over!” she declaims as she burns the silk shirts she bought for erstwhile cool Giorgio. The magic of the little circus by the river (including the daring water show) still providing a counterweight to a deliriously self-absorbed Cabiria, we move on to the hooker track where she derives all that cash to be dismally thrown away; and before long she’s brawling with a colleague who (in retaliation for the young and vivacious protagonist’s ridiculing her being middle aged [in fairness, the older attraction hailed her arrival with, “Here comes that psycho again!”]) bloodies her nose, eliciting from her the overstatement, “She ruined my face!” But right here, before misrepresenting a very subtle discharge of creative bounty, we have to allow its full weight to something Cabiria does before the riot. On hopping from the clattering freight moto giving her a lift to the supposed site of ecstasy, she enthuses about the Fiat one of the girls has bought—already commandeered by her pimp on the grounds that she doesn’t know how to drive. “Vroom! Vroom!” she produces expertly and quite disarmingly, being a physical performer of impressive emotive range. (Within that selfsame scrum, she also dances very well—delightfully, in fact, to a car radio—with one of the guys keeping tabs on the action.) So was little Nick, emitting those sounds in a 1955 noir called Kiss Me Deadly, a film whose obsession with dangerous, fateful choices and balances (with, that is, Pandora’s Box) has become part of the invention of Fellini’s melodrama which transcends melodrama.

Mike Hammer, protagonist of Kiss Me Deadly, had a favorite bar called Pigalle where progress could be made. On being chauffeured that night to the tony, unexplored territory of Via Veneto by a pimp who wants to take up where Giorgio left off, Cabiria teams up with another Alpha male, somewhat like Mike (movie heartthrob, Alberto Lazzari, whom she immediately recognizes), whose bar of choice is the Piccadilly. And there we get a taste of what astonishments bodies can be. The entertainment consists of a pair of statuesque black women (as far from Cabiria’s physique as imaginable), taking their cues from a battery of bongo drums. Their performance of quick and vibrant ranging over the stage area, especially notable for supple, generous extensions of limbs, evokes not just pristine authority, but that dimension of authority having to do with comprehensive harmonizing amongst others. We have seen a form of wildness from our protagonist; but here, providing a cornucopia of food for thought, was primal force with a cogent reserve of discipline. While the real pros onstage dazzle with their uncovering of compelling poise, Cabiria gets entangled in trying to pass through a curtain (an old silent movie sight-gag), directing our attention to her not, somehow, being equipped for the Big Leagues. The last portion of the act slips into the cliché of jerky sex play (a moment whereby a quick pan of the women in the audience humorously discloses a vote of non-confidence). Before teaming up with Alberto, Cabiria had delighted us with her dancing (joy suffusing her face and every inch of her tiny body) on the track, in a kind of paradise of lightning-quick turns and effervescent progressions. Now, a mambo band to the fore, she partners the impressive celebrity (who, miffed by his gorgeous but jealous and mutinous girlfriend, brings the less than sublime hooker on board to see how a farce could revive his wit—“Let’s have some fun!”), uncoupling their team as she does a solo turn of rich rhythmic intuition and sunburst level glee the care for which giving her such grief. To sustain how close she is to real pay dirt, another pan shot reveals patrons won over by her heart at its best.

Alberto drives his largish white convertible home; and there she is next to him—Mike and Christina, not, alas, being challenged as ironically doomed wild (and loving) ones. Alberto has a villa filled with wild animals (and tame pets), being a notable who lucratively hedges on creative verve (but also an effete and undisciplined beholder of the paradoxical synthesis implicit in that alignment. Accordingly the charmer beset with romantic trouble settles into listening to a disc beaming out Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (pressed by others to galvanize serious warfare; but here we encounter only a sedate, sedative passage, continuous with his dancing). When asked by her host to rate the music she states, “That’s not my taste…” She plunges into the dinner of lobster, caviar and the like which his staff has prepared, urging him, “Have some of this chicken breast to chase away the blues!” This snippet of perfect carnal pitch (putting her briefly in league with the very best of what the Afro dancers had to offer) comes to us, however, couched in the most common subtext. After an outreach of truly patrician scope in smiling warmly at him and touching his face and arm, and kissing his hand (part of a thread of delighting in another’s presence)—“Dammit, I know who you are. You’re as good looking as your house”—which he reciprocates to his own surprise, she bursts into tears. Responding to his confusion, she shouts out, “Who’s gonna believe this? Give me a picture signed, “Cabiria was at my house.” On the drive out to the villa, she had yelled to the two carriage-trade hookers who looked down their nose at her on her starting the prowl to offset the embarrassment on her own turf, wanting them to be diminished by her momentary advantage. Now, in face of the lavish surroundings, she feels compelled to point out that she owns her house, that it’s equipped with electricity, that she never had to sleep “under the arches,” that her only friend is Wanda since the others are beneath her. “It’s enough for me. I like it.” We should pause to appreciate the feast implicit in that latter flourish. It opens wide the tension at the depths of our protagonist’s intent. She does rise to extraordinary heights of sufficiency. What Nights of Cabiria impels us to rise to is its saga of the benightment undoing those heights.

The willowy dissenter against Alberto’s image of Mr. Right crashes the supper where integrity was on the menu. Cabiria is hastily consigned to the en suite master bathroom, spending the rest of the night with a puppy and periodically peeking at the keyhole. Alberto tells Jessie the Pretender (whom we first saw in a long white fur coat, as against Kiss Mr Deadly’s Christina’s big white trench coat—the latter obsessing about a locker key; the former obsessing about the ignition key to her rich sometime boyfriend’s sports car), “Your jealousy is morbid” [lacks disinterestedness]. “Ciao, ciao, bye…” is his send-off to Cabiria while Jessie sleeps. Our diminished protagonist trudges down his driveway with its retro-classical statuary. Cut to a few hours later, at night, on the track, and one of her colleagues mocking, “Alberto’s been looking for you!” But cut also to her morbid side completely taking over. The other girls are aflutter about an evangelical event taking place now, whereby the presence of the Virgin Mary would lift the faithful to new heights. Cabiria, no slouch, as we’ve seen, in finding the world at large to have its down side, serves up the resistance, “What do I ask for? I’ve got everything.” 15 love, so far, especially if she’s not messing around with strident self-congratulation. A little procession of devotees (of much longer standing than the hookers), padding barefoot through the track, singing a gentle hymn, sends out such a contrast of solemn piety that Cabiria beholds them with awe and with a measure of self-criticalness ready to find serenity not along lines of her strong suit of sensual vibrancy but along lines of the strictures of an ascetic establishment.

The visit of denizens of the hooker track to the fishing apparatus of the Church represents, it seems to me, the climax of Cabiria’s turmoil, the point from which her ability to play her strengths becomes irrevocably impaired. (The drift is further anticipated by an episode whereby she’s called into service by a trucker while she’s put to shame by the processional. We see her tramping cross-country and we hear her complain, “He calls that a short cut! I’ve been walking for hours!” The short cut she contemplates taking to gain mastery over her jeopardy will prove to be as chimerical as the trucker’s bright idea.) The scene at the holy place offers a stream of sensibility quite amazing in the contours of its dramatic power. Its prefatory moment comprises her crossing paths with a Good Samaritan. Still on that short cut a long way from home, she notices a man distributing food, clothing and respect to a segment of Rome’s population living in a series of deep sinkholes. Once again drawn to an incontrovertible piety, she asks him for a lift (a part, then, of the short cut taking forever) and, before his rounds are done, she is startled (not so unlike the transformation of Scrooge) that one of his admirers is Bomba (shades of Pandora’s Box?), once the undisputed monarch of the track and now an object lesson in abandoning the Oldest Profession. A step in that direction is her replying, to his asking her name, in the form, Maria Carelinni, of her early life as a supposedly pious young rural girl. From out of that eagerness to coincide with venerable virtue, her rather fatuous remark, “There’s lots of starving people in Rome, right?” signals a baby step into the mainstream. She leaves him, after the lift, with ardent thanks. From there (while still telling everyone she’s just humouring dumb bunny Wanda), it’s buying candles and wincing at the invalids—“So young!” Whereas some of the entourage focus on the pose-for-photo-ops in front of a canvas stressing space and aviation, Cabiria checks with Wanda the right way to do the Responses and suddenly declares, “I’m gonna ask for forgiveness too!” She’s disappointed that her chum’s fervor has disappeared, but she still counts on her to get her up to speed about the Act of Contrition. (Perhaps nearly lost in this thrust of dramatic reversal is the belying of her tendency to evoke a past heavily suffused in Church experience.) Closing in on the altar, they’re buffeted by hysterical pleas and blind pushing. At first Cabiria finds it all grotesque (“I feel so sleazy”); but, standing amidst throngs chanting, “Grazie, Madonna!” her regard floods over from drawing a line to crossing a line. “Grazie, Madonna!” she shouts, several times. She tells Wanda, “I feel so strange!” She calls out, in response to the priest’s instruction, “Look into her eyes [of the statue] and you will feel the warmth of hope”—“Make me change my life!”

From this high-pressure zone, in blazing electrical illumination, there is a memorable cut to the grounds in heavy overcast, littered with junk food containers and littered with the posse from the track (a couple of them dancing to a fox trot [which elicits ‘…so old-fashioned…”] and the others sprawled on the grass, drinking white wine). We see only Cabiria’s back as she sits by herself staring into the horizon. After some peevishness (about a wayward soccer ball from an adjacent field) on the part of the putative devil-may-care free spirits, Cabiria leaps to her feet, punishes that ball and cries out, “We haven’t changed!” Wanda, seeing her so tense, had urged her to have a drink; and now someone remarks that even one drink often pushes her over the edge. Now an avatar of counting blessings, no matter where they come from, the bovine sybarite Wanda (her fling with religion about as deep as trying new lipstick) challenges her slipping friend, “Why do you want to change?” And now a very different person from the pilgrim of a short while ago, she spots a group of girls headed for the church and taunts them, “Just look at the little nuns! Come dance with us!” Wanda drags her away, scolding, “You’re blind drunk! Someone else tries to rally her with, “You’re gonna get us arrested!”

Her range of assessing the crisis thoroughly messed up at ground zero, we find that with nightfall she’s come to a theatre where she asks, “Is the show any good?” What is most apparent about the event is that the audience is filled with noisy barracudas ravenous for slashing the self-esteem of everyone they see. And the school of killers includes one deceptively mild predator. Having been dared to be part of a hypnotist’s routine she—still on the lookout for transcendent change—enacts in a trance her “deepest desire,” namely, to be smiled upon by a conventionally ideal husband within the orbit of piety she once again insists to be her roots. On her snapping out of the reverie, the wags cruelly mock her ambitions. And the odd-one-out smoothy forges an alliance of their supposed hearts of gold. Magic in the air, for sure. But a Black Magic the dimensions of which are truly devastating. The preamble (featuring some of the smart guys) to Cabiria’s moment in the spotlight of that shabby theatre involved the imagined shipwreck of a craft called Intrepid. Still her own worst enemy, she mocks the wise-guys who had just shown childish cowardice in face of the imagined peril. “Scared, eh?” But no one, the narrative reveals, is more strikingly scared about treacherous seas than she is. Her on-stage fantasy is all about avoidance of reflective risk and effort; and the canny, oily, so sincerely-seeming con-artist, calling himself Oscar, a supposed coincidence as to the Oscar in her public dream onstage (and an Oscar-level sell as to his being Mr. Right), can read her like a book. (He’d have had a much harder read with the vitally [if unsteadily] daring Cabiria of the past.) “I find I sympathize with you [and your banal hopes]. When we’re faced with purity we have to admit a way defeating cynicism…True things cannot be touched by human vulgarity.” (Perhaps the wag in Fellini was aroused in his having them share a Fernet-Branca digestive to launch their dream-boat, at a bar near a theatre called Lux, after the stomach-turning gestures of the evening.) Oscar eases them toward a bright future, with the poetic observation, “The City is so vast and we still have so much to say to each other.” That equation, we notice, comes up short concerning discovery of the vastness of Rome, and pushes the priority of “saying,” mouthing fatuous sentiments that don’t begin to deal with “vastness,” with an expenditure of energy neither has the stomach to engage.

As Cabiria marches toward what would for her be an indubitable triumph, Wanda’s being a sounding board represents a nuance setting in more rich relief the harsh and yet very touching struggle welling up to a startling cul-de-sac. “What’s he after?” the more balanced woman asks, on first hearing her brag about a man who always pays at restaurants. “Who cares, as long as he always pays,” is her bravado with those non-romantic lovers, her colleagues. But she also maintains, “He gets a kick out of talking to me because I understand him.” Next time out, she presses him about her long-term future; and he has a line all figured out. “I wanted [to propose]. I didn’t have the courage, but I’ve wanted to ask you since the first time I saw you…” Racing back to Wanda’s place, next to where she lives a life surprisingly different from that of the former, Cabiria screams with joy, celebrating the fast-tracking she had become eager to cash in on. “What is it, you nut?” that quieter and more generous sensibility asks her. (Wanda’s momentary zeal for the Miracle Event gave us a taste of her more earthy balancing instincts; whereas miniature Cabiria becomes totally frenetic about it. At the shrine, Cabiria tries to rally her friend to the prospect of asking for mercy from the Madonna. “I’ll ask for what I feel like…”/ “But you said…”/ “I changed my mind…” As if she needed getting more fired up about bathetic ultimacy, in the midst of the anxiety about “What’s he after?” she runs into a Benedictine Brother trolling in the wasteland where she lives, cheery and gentle, who, on hearing her admit that she’s not in God’s grace, tempts her with, “I’m in God’s grace and I’m happy. We all should be in God’s grace. Everyone in God’s grace is happy… Girls should get married and make children. Matrimony is a sacred thing…” Her countering that preachy incursion—“Why should I get married? Listen, “I’m fine the way I am…”—is not convincing.) “I’m getting married, that’s what!” she beams. “He knows all about me. But he’s a saint, an angel! He loves me! He loves me!”

She’s happy to sell everything (“We’re buying a store”) and, though Wanda is saddened about her leaving, Cabiria does not muster any adult empathy about her cherishing of her friend’s warmth. She delivers the homily, “You suffer. You go through hell. But then happiness comes to everyone.” She goes on to tell Wanda, “You’ll get a miracle like me.” “Ya, sure,” the more modern, more substantial lady replies. The money in place, Oscar, having taken off a pair of shades not so well designed as Giorgio’s, gives her a predator’s glare overlooking a beautiful, shimmering body of water far from anyone (about which she remarks, in a cursory way, “What a strange light…”), and she falls to her knees, she hands over her purse and screams, “Kill me! Kill me! Throw me off the cliff! I don’t wanna live anymore!” He runs off with the Oscar and she writhes in the fallen leaves and the mud. Her winner take all campaign has ended, for the time being. On getting back to where there are peppy tourists—specifically a group of high school and college age kids (some playing guitars and singing) rambling along a heavily wooded roadway and ready for a less rigid sense of romance and fruition than the one she had allowed herself to heavily invest in—Cabiria wipes the gloom off her face and gives them and us a bittersweet smile. Back to the old Cabiria, deranged but game? Doubtful. On with the happiness that comes to “everyone”? Doubtful. The smash and grab thespian claimed his mother’s name was “Elsa.” “I like the name, Elsa,” Cabiria simpers. “It’s pretty.” Elsa was also the name of the former queen of the track (Elsa to Father Christmas; Bomba to the track), now living in a cave. Fellini’s rich and wise flood of a film brings us so many ravishing sensual appointments and so many instances of horrific hardness where slipping is often fatal, one way or another.