nights of cabiria (w&d. fellini, w. ennio flaiano, tullio pinelli, pier paolo pasolini)

There’s a beautiful quote in the helpful back page of the BFI (NFT) notes from Fellini: “The film doesn’t have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene where the story reaches a conclusion so definitive  that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since.” This quote strikes such a chord because it talks both about the film and about the act of creation. The filmmaker has constructed a character (played by his wife) with whom he has, you could say, fallen in love. At the end  of the film he has to leave her. Had he left her in a resolved ‘happy ending’ scenario, it would have been easier for Fellini to let her drift away, just another of his many characters. As it is, he leaves her deliberately in a state of uncertainty, and so he is compelled, as the quote says, to return to her fretfully, an uneasy god. 

The quote also feels relevant in so far as the happy ending the film almost postulates for Cabiria doesn’t seem faithful to her story. Cabiria is from the margins. This is by and large a cheerful film, one which celebrates its lead character and her world, in spite of its harshness. Cabiria is a survivor, a fantasist whose feet are nevertheless on the ground. Nevertheless, how many poor prostitutes struggling to get by in post-war Italy were granted a happy ending? Had Fellini given her this kind of resolution, it wouldn’t have felt truthful to the world he depicts. It would have been closer to Pretty Woman than Rome Open City. As it is Nights of Cabiria treads a fine line between social realism and something approaching disfunctional romcom. Cabiria is the sort of gutsy character producers dream of because they know an audience will fall in love with them. Giulietta Masina plays her with an irreverent delight. Even the breeze block shack she has created seems adorable on the inside. (A shack so reminiscent of the buildings in slums all over the world.) But, as much as the film delights in Cabiria’s joie-de-vivre (Chaplineque), the realities of her existence are discernible at the edges. A pitiable fate, living in a hole in the ground, lurks. We’ll never know whether Cabiria succumbed to this fate or escaped it. Fellini opted out of a definitive resolution, but in so doing he found a way of being truthful both to the spirit of his times and the spirit of his character.