***Spoilers Below***

Correspondence Review of Nights of Cabiria

02/02/06 Perc   Finally watched Cabiria, and I owe you great thanks for recommending it.  It is one of the most hopeful, cheerful movies I've ever seen and I was moved watching it.  I think the best part is the first speech Oscar gives after the magic show...  And you're right - I'm a sucker for the middle-aged actresses and the woman who played Cabiria was phenomenal.  If I had only seen this one movie of his, I'd say Fellini was a phenomenal director.

More on this when I'm done gushing incoherently.

02/02/06 Mike    My roommates misinterpreted the final scene, thinking the group of people were making fun of her, so they thought it was the most depressing film, but I tried to explain the spiritual significance of it, how it plays back off the scene outside the church when Cabiria is seperated from the congregation by a ditch.  to each their own i guess.  I find it one of those films (like naked) I can watch over and over because of the performance.  there is something magical to Guiletta's performance that makes you love her.  This is my favorite work by fellini, but a close second is La Dolce Vita (what bill murray and scarlett johanssen watched in the hotel room in Lost in Translation).  Like I said, to enjoy it you have to treat it like a mini-series with individual segments exploring the life of paparazzi playboy Marcello, but it is so worth it.  It also has another classic ending which borrows from a motif in Cabiria.  And I strongly recommend The Bicycle Thief, to round out your italian education, because that film is so damn perfect and so damn sad and again it is a film I could watch a thousand times because of the performance.

02/02/06 Perc   I saw in the last scene that she sees herself marching on her way to Rome at fiftten when she had the black hair past her shoulders - and her little brilliant twinge of smile told me that, despite the speechifying to Oscar about the beatings she took to get the money, there was still the hope and happiness of finding a good man, and a joy in the progress.  Forgive  if this is a totally obvious conclusion, I've just been trying to quantify what it is that I like about this movie so much... There's something elecrical going on in the ambience, though, that I  think PT Anderson effectively captured with Punch Drunk Love.  ... Maybe...

Giulietta I found to be like a pre-Bancroft - the same rough Italian gestures that are open and sweet enough to be attractive and genuine without necessarily reeking of femininity and sexuality.  This kind of presentation is almost totally absent in female actresses today.  It's also comforting to know the hamminess of my everyday conversational gestures have precedent in  fine Italian cinema.  :D  It's probably just a genetic thing... my Spanish half remaining stalwartly melodramatic.

02/02/06 Mike    I didn't really interpret the ending that way, like I said I saw it as a spiritual journey... and finally she was one with the congregation she felt isolated from throughout the film.  And that sort of split second spiritual awakening is so dostoevsky (I know I have said that), it is the cinematic expression of what happens so many times in his books, people stumbling into an epiphany without knowing they are doing it.

I loved punchdrunk because at no time in the film could you anticipate where things were going, it was a story that unfolded.

I kind of share your obsession for performers, but I am not limited to this weird middle aged actress type.  but I think it is the performance which makes a film most of the time, or it is performance which makes me want to return to a film to watch a secord or third time.  This cinema magic I was talking about before... includes David Thewlis in Naked, Audrey Tautou in Amelie, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before sunrise/sunset, Antione Doinel in 400 blows (I forget his real name), Giulietta in Cabiria, The bicycle Thief guy, Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List, Faye Wong in Chungking Express, those are the ones that stick out for me right now I am sure there are others (I may add this as a thread on twitchfilm).  but there is something transcendental in these performances, and it is not necessarily good acting, but that that person at that time playing that character fit so perfectly that the joy factor of watching it never diminishes.  I would be interested to know your nominees.

02/02/06 Perc    I am hugely interested in your interpretation of Cabiria's church moment - I thought her getting drunk and shouting that nothing's changed after the visit to the shrine put the religious experience in the context of like a drug - there was the euphoria of it and the desire for change - and the thing that lingers from the euphoric experience is her ability to trust this guy, despite the fact that everybody suspects he wants something from her - even she herself expects it right up to the point he actually delivers.

So, I saw her smile at the young lady with the black shoulder-length hair to be a recognition of her young self - optimistic and pre-degeneration, and a confirmation that the bumpy road is joyous and worthwhile, that even though the suspension of her cynicism yielded the expected results, the value was in the suspension of the cynicism.  The optimism was for experiencing the process without letting the result get one down.  I guess I played the whole thing through the prism that I thought she was going to wake up at any moment (until Oscar bitched her over) from the hypnosis-scene perpetrated upon her. Like the optismism is a semi-conscious state that can be distinguished from and allow the somnolent protagonist to like transcend the cynicism of reality.

Heh.  My obsession with excellent performances is not fixated to middle-aged actresses.  I personally and fixated to middle aged actresses (particularly foreign blondes of Russian heritage, don't ask me why this is the trend) because I'm identifying with some latent character element thing I want to cultivate in myself.  It's kind of gross and parasitic, in a vaguely imitation-flattery kind of way.

Actually, okay my list of plot/film defining performances includes - Jeremy Irons for Lolita; Christian Bale for Empire of the Sun (which you know you wouldn't dare to deny); Bening for "Being Julia"; Chris Cooper for Adaptation (which, yes the rest of the movie was good, but him in particular); Kieran Culkin for Igby (which is inifnitely re-watchable in my book); Jude Law in Talented Mr. Ripley; Dianne Wiest is on the list pretty much solely for the light she brought to Parenthood.

I mean, my ultimate perfect character/time citation would be Diego Luna and Garcia Bernal, but I wouldn't necessariy assert they were playing dramatic characters (going on the hilarious commentary track in which they blaze and make fun of each other's wangs the whole time).  But I might be saying that because I rewatched bits of it last night.

Okay, actually, it so happens that maybe Toni Collette can throw down in everything she's in, as well as Cecilia Roth and Bening (Mirren is, alas, utterly fallible in some of the shit she's done).  And Bancroft is just on the list for personal resemblance sake.