The White Sheik is a rather plain film about two subjects which Italian film seems to have an obsession with - Infidelity and Catholicism. It is saved by the fact that it is an early film by Fellini, and has moments of near divine inspiration.

One moment, to be specific. The man has given up looking for his wife (who was taken away on a whirlwind adventure), and he is sitting on the edge of a fountain in a town square in Rome, bemoaning the sad fate of his week old marriage. Up walks two prostitutes. They don't look like normal prostitutes, they look like normal women, but they are quite defiantly prostitutes. One (who is talking really fast) sees him and wants to find out whats wrong with him, she runs over to him, and her and her friend manage to get the entire story about his lost love. The fast talking one has a somewhat playful sympathy for him, while the other a more honest sympathy for him. Then an old man shows up who the girls know, the fast talking one runs to him, talks about how he is, and convinces him to do his fire breathing trick.

The old man is breathing fire like a carnival man performing for a little girl, while the other prostitute says she is taking the man to her place.

The image is beautiful. The contrast of the two virginal characters who hobnob with the elite (the girl of which is missing), and the two innocent prostitutes who play with street hobos drives home, not a point, but a feeling for the complexity of what it means to be fulfilled (innocent is an ugly word, but its probably the word Fellini would have used).

More than anything its a beautiful shot.

I was actually not horribly impressed by La Strada when I first watched it. André Bazin wrote a really nice essay about it though, which featured prominently in my master's thesis. I wouldn't make it the first Fellini film you watch (that would be La Dolce Vita), but it is something well worthwhile.

The film centers on a "slow" girl, who is sent to be the wife/employee of a traveling performer (a strong man). The traveling performer treats her horribly. She meets an acrobat who treats her well, he tries to convince her to leave the strong man, but she won't. The strong man accidentally kills the acrobat, the girl goes crazy, he leaves her, he finds out later that she dies, he is left alone on a beach.

What Bazin essentially argues is that given the general attitude of the strong man throughout the film, there is no reason for him to feel remorse, it is not in his character to feel sorry for how he has hurt someone. What he feels instead is the visible absence of the fullness of the girls character. The way she deals with space, the way she understands things, enlivens the world, and now the world that she has created is gone.

If you read more of my posts about love, you'll note that my basic argument about love in cinema is about cinemas ability to show two "worlds" interacting. Not just two basic sets of beliefs and prejudices (that's the stuff of bad romantic comedy), but the actual physical way specific individuals orient themselves in the world. A good love story is about the confusion one faces when one is fascinated by the way another persons moves through space. Then we as the audience are fascinated by the both of them (its love all around).

Both the girl and the acrobat in La Strada, do not just move through space, they float (the acrobat literally). They have a way of livening up any space they enter, despite the fact that they both lack anything that could be commonly understood as an intellect. They could be, and are, beautiful together, but in the girl's understanding her 'way of being' is intertwined with the strong man's. The strong man does not think of her like that. He thinks about her as any other person, someone with utility, but someone who can't get in the way of his survival.

At the last moment it is obvious that, her way of being was intertwined with his, that she was in a very real sense a part of him, and a part of how he oriented himself to the world. With her death the world is palpably 'missing something.'

buy La Strada here