Cabiria leads an existence that is almost feral, but at any moment she could find herself in a rich man’s apartment or on a squalid street, and she rises above it all.
One of Fellini’s truly great films, with a fierce note of melancholy and even tragedy that is perhaps atypical of him. Masina plays Cabiria, a sex worker whose paradoxical mixture of vulnerability and defiant strength is rendered in a series of episodes. She lives in a wretched shack on the outskirts of town: the eerie modernised wasteland that captured the imagination of both Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Cabiria leads an existence that is almost feral, but at any moment she could find herself in a rich man’s apartment or on a squalid street, and she rises above it all.