"Nights of Cabiria" - Film Review

I love, love, love Giulietta Masina. So much of Nights of Cabiria is sold by Masina’s great performance. Cabiria is stubborn, proud, quick-tempered, and naïve, and played by the wrong actress our sympathies wouldn’t necessarily lie with this character. It’s a tricky line being walked and Masina nails it. She’s warm and charming, and there’s something about her performance where she easily draws you in.

Cabiria is a prostitute working the streets of Rome. But the film never makes her job a big part of her character. Nights of Cabiria is part of the Italian Neorealist tradition of postwar Italian filmmaking. Cabiria a working class gal who, like many Italians of the 1950’s, was struggling to get by. Her mother put her to work at fifteen, when she was too unsuspecting to fully comprehend what she was doing at such a young age. 

She’s a bit clueless in that way though. The film starts with her getting pushed into a river by a man who feigned affection for her so he could rob her. She nearly drowns but she doesn’t immediately accept the truth of the situation; it’s only after her loving but stern friend Wanda (Franca Marzi) sets her straight that she snaps back to reality.

Throughout the film she keeps meeting men and falling head over heels for them despite her better judgment. She meets a big shot movie star, Alberto Lazzari (Amedo Nazzari), who spends the night with her after he’s spurned by his girlfriend. Cabiria flirts with the idea that something might happen even though she’s only kidding herself. The girlfriend shows up in a huff and Cabiria is forced to sit in the next room while the guy sleeps with the girlfriend. Clearly she’s chasing after the wrong men.

She becomes convinced she can’t change her life. She meets a man who provides charitable help to homeless people in the countryside, and she wonders why she can’t do something more with her life. She goes to a religious procession to a shrine for the Virgin Mary and asks for guidance, but it doesn’t help.

Cabiria’s outward cynicism hides a hopeless romantic side deep down. She finally shows this side after being hypnotized at a magician’s show. It’s a surreal scene with a dreamlike quality. I was given goosebumps; there’s a transcendence to it.  The world seems to shut out and Cabiria is told to imagine she’s talking to a man named Oscar; she’s like a giddy teenager all over again as the magician has her imagine sweet nothings are being spoken to her. She’s soon snapped back into reality and completely embarrassed. After the show, a man claims his name is Oscar and that it’s fate. 

They start spending time together. He claims he doesn’t care about her past. She even tells him about her line of work and he doesn't appear to mind. He asks her to marry him. Could this be for real? 

Director Federico Fellini sets the story in the world of the everyday. There’s a beautiful naturalism to the story and events unfold with a pleasing simplicity and feel as if they could go anywhere at any moment. Though there’s a true to life nature to the film, it also has this inexplicable whimsicalness.

Its marvelous simplicity deceptively hides a powerful tale and slowly builds to a knockout of an ending. Utterly charming, lyrical, funny, and sad, Nights of Cabiria is a fantastic movie. 

Grade: A