Nights of Cabiria
- April 14, 2007
- 2 comments
On a whim, I added a film I had never heard of before to my Netflix queue a while back and forgot about it. When it arrived the other day, I almost sent it back without watching it because it didn’t look that interesting. I am so glad I decided to watch it instead.
Nights of Cabiria is a wonderful film which won an Oscar for best foreign film back in 1958. It’s considered one of the Italian director Federico Fellini’s masterpieces, and I can see why. It starts off a bit slow, but after a while the heroine of the film, brilliantly performed by Giullietta Masina, begins to grow on you.
Masina plays a prostitute in Rome named Cabiria who never gives up on finding true love despite the hardships life seems to constantly give her. She’s tough, stubborn and proud of her self-sufficiency, even though she’s barely making it. Throughout the film, you see her lifted up and then dropped into sadness time and again.
One scene that really stuck out, in my opinion, was the magic show she decides to watch on a whim. She gets pulled into an act on stage that reveals the real Cabiria. It brilliantly contrasts crudeness with purity, innocence and love. It was that scene that made me really understand and like her. I found myself wishing I knew her, and by the end of the film she felt like a close friend.
Speaking of the ending of the film, it was one of the best film endings I’ve seen. I won’t go into too much detail, but will say that the last 10 minutes or so of the film will run you through a range of emotions.
If you haven’t already seen Nights of Cabiria, I highly recommend it. I also highly recommend watching it in Italian with the English subtitles versus the dubbed version. Foreign films are always much better in their original languages.
Just a note, that should probably be “heroine”, not “heroin”