La Strada - Reception

Reception

Italy and France

Tullio Cicciarelli of Il Lavoro nuovo saw the film as "an unfinished poem," left unfinished deliberately by the filmmaker for fear that "its essence be lost in the callousness of critical definition, or in the ambiguity of classification." Cicciarelli claimed that:

La Strada cannot be classified nor does it sustain the weight of rational discussion and comparison (when the film was shown at the Venice Film Festival, many critics saw in it suggestions of Chaplin). The film should be accepted for its strange fragility and its often too colourful, almost artificial moments, or else totally rejected. If we try to analyze Fellini's film, its fragmentary quality becomes immediately evident and we are obliged to treat each fragment, each personal comment, each secret confession separately.

In Il Secolo XIX, Ermanno Contini praised Fellini as "a master story-teller" and wrote:

The narrative is light and harmonious, drawing its essence, resilience, uniformity and purpose from small details, subtle annotations and soft tones that slip naturally into the humble plot of a story apparently void of action. But how much meaning, how much ferment enrich this apparent simplicity. It is all there although not always clearly evident, not always interpreted with full poetical and human eloquence: it is suggested with considerable delicacy and sustained by a subtle emotive force.

When the film was released in France in 1955, Dominique Aubier of Les Cahiers du cinéma thought La Strada belonged to "the mythological class, a class intended to captivate the critics more perhaps than the general public." Aubier concluded:

Fellini attains a summit rarely reached by other film directors: style at the service of the artist’s mythological universe. This example once more proves that the cinema has less need of technicians—there are too many already—than of creative intelligence. To create such a film, the author must have had not only a considerable gift for expression but also a deep understanding of certain spiritual problems.

Jean Aurel, writing in Arts magazine in March 1955, praised Giulietta Masina's performance - " appears to be directly inspired by the best in Chaplin, but with a freshness and sense of timing that seem to have been invented for this film alone." He called the film "Bitter, yet full of hope. A lot like life." And Louis Chauvet writing in Le Figaro also praised the film; "The atmosphere of the drama is decribed with a visual strength that has rarely been equaled."