Le notti di Cabiria

Federico Fellini's 1957 classic about the misfortunes of a streetwalker in postwar Rome is getting a 40th-anniversary re-release, in a brand new 35mm print with refurbished picture and sound (hundreds of missing frames have been restored), a completely new translation and laser subtitles, and the legendary missing "Man with the Sack" sequence that Fellini cut because of pressure from the Church, which felt the episode showed it in a bad light. It's a milestone of postwar Italian filmmaking, and the Brattle is giving it a full two weeks.

Cabiria isn't exactly Via Veneto material -- she lives out on the road to Ostia and works the low-rent districts, though she's such a tough cookie it's a wonder she gets any customers. There are three main episodes: her boyfriend of a couple months grabs her purse and pushes her in the river; a big movie star invites her home after breaking up with his girlfriend, but the glamorous pair reconcile before Cabiria can even get a nice meal out of him; and a young man asks Cabiria to marry him, but he's actually just out to steal her life savings. The "Man with the Sack" takes food to people who live in "caves" -- holes, really -- outside Rome; Cabiria is amazed at his philanthropy. It's not hard to see why the Church might have taken offense.

I keep trying to like Le notti di Cabiria; it keeps defeating me. For the title role Fellini cast his wife, Giulietta Masina, an accomplished actress who draws comparisons to Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball -- but to me Cabiria suggests Chaplin in his self-pitying Little Tramp mode and Ball at her self-centered Lucy Ricardo worst. Even when she snags the movie star (a feat that her ratty fur and bobby socks render even less credible), she treats him more like a trophy john than as someone who may need a little attention himself. Fellini might answer that Cabiria hasn't any sympathy to spare -- and no wonder given that, except for the "Man with the Sack," the men in her life are all creeps. She's the prototype hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold, the victim of a brutal society. And the ending, where a kind "Buona sera" puts the smile back on her face, is as shallow as those in Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly/Winter Light/The Silence trilogy. The film looks badly dated next to Michelangelo Antonioni's effort from the same period, Il grido.

Still, Italian movies in general, and Fellini's in particular, tend to have more going on than meets the eye. There must be something happening here, because, just like Cabiria, I keep trying.

-- Jeffrey Gantz