FILM / Director's Cut: Finding the true way: Tom DiCillo on one Fellini film that is enough to make strongmen weep
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Your support makes all the difference.La Strada was made in 1954 by Federico Fellini. The story is about this guy, Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who's a circus strongman whose act is really a fake - what he does is he breaks a chain by expanding his chest, but he does it with a fake chain. I took that idea of a fake persona and I applied it to Johnny Suede. The scene I've chosen is at the very end of the film. Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), the semi-retarded woman he has been travelling with, has died some time before. (He is actually the cause of her death as a result of his cold brutishness towards her. She is the only person who ever really loves him, but he has never acknowledged this - on the surface he's glad to be rid of her.)
In the scene that I'm talking about, he's in a countryside bar. It's night and the bar is deserted except for a couple of peasants. He's drunk. The owner wants to close up, he wants to keep drinking and he gets into a fight with the owner. The two guys in the bar jump in and a very brutal fight takes place. Together the three of them kick Zampano out of the bar. What's so beautiful in this scene is that his drunkenness is putting him in touch with his tremendous anger and self-loathing. It's a beautifully realistic scene.
He ends up walking on this beach at night. He's still drunk, and falls down on the sand. He's just lying there. The camera comes in on his face. Almost by accident he happens to look up into the night sky. He sees the stars and you get the sense that he is suddenly in touch with his own mortality; that in the universe he is completely alone and that he finally realises the incredible pain that he has created for himself by refusing to acknowledge the love of this woman. He just starts crying. There is no dialogue in the scene but it conveys a heavy, existential moment in a deeply humanistic way. To me, it's one of the most emotional moments in cinema. I took it and applied it to a scene towards the end of Johnny Suede when Johnny is sitting alone in a doughnut shop and he goes through the same type of realisation.
(Photograph omitted)
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