Word: guilietta
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Gelsomina's (Guilietta Masina) sister Rosa has already died on the road with Zampano's (Anthony Quinn) one-man travelling show when "La Strada begins." Needing another assistant, Zampano returns to Rosa's village where the girls' mother agrees to sell Gelsomina to Zampano also, in exchange for 10,000 lire. The other children are going hungry and Gelsomina herself is regarded as somewhat worthless; she is exceedingly timid and does no work to help the family. If this exchange seems somewhat coldhearted, it only hints at the treatment Gelsomina will receive throughout the rest of the film...
...Guilietta Masina is charming as the wide eyed Gelsomina, who seems unable to get angry over others' cruelty to her. Masina's Gelsomina gazes at the world with wonder, although there can be little wonderful about its realities for her. Fellini offsets her timidity, which practically amounts to a social stupidity, against her purity of spirit. The combination gives her a childlike, saintly aura...
...symbol that relates back to the emotions or the unconscious of either of the two characters in the way that the horse walking down the street in La Strada or the barge in Juliet of the Spirits depended for their reality on the emotions and unconscious of Guilietta Massina. Fellini is giving us Rome unchannelled by the characters' perceptions of it. With such free-floating imagery and relatively undefined characters, the thematic line becomes less important than the lincar story line, since it is story-coincidences of time and space-rather than a theme which binds the whole thing together...
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