GIULIETTA MASINA: FILM'S ETERNAL WAIF
GIULIETTA MASINA: FILM'S ETERNAL WAIF
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
There are certain roles that mark a performer forever.
Sean Connery will inexorably be James Bond, and who can think of Vivien Leigh apart from Scarlett O'Hara?
Humphrey Bogart played many roles, but for most of us, he will always be Rick, who came for the waters and ended up with a beautiful friendship.
Giulietta Masina shares this fate. For the 32 years since she overwhelmed the film world with her portrayal of Gelsomina in ''La Strada,'' she has always been the warmhearted innocent, the foolish little waif, the 33-year-old who looked like the 14-year-old circus performer. She is the pantomimist who promised to be a female Charlie Chaplin.
Some of her subsequent films with her director-husband Federico Fellini won acclaim, notably her portrayal of a prostitute in ''Nights of Cabiria.'' But even as a prostitute, she was an innocent, kindhearted, far more sinned against than sinning, trusting everyone and maintaining hope even when everything seemed lost.
In an odd sort of way, Miss Masina's return for American audiences in Mr. Fellini's ''Ginger and Fred,'' opening in New York on Friday at Loews Tower East, follows the same scenario.
She is no longer 14, but as the faded dancer Ginger, Miss Masina finds herself making an absurd comeback by way of an appalling television variety show. Co-starring with Marcello Mastroianni for the first time, although each of them has made four films with Mr. Fellini, Miss Masina plays a wistful character who revisits Rome to be reunited for television with her former partner in a dance act once known as Ginger and Fred. Television, as depicted by Mr. Fellini, is at least as corrupting as the circus - or prostitution. Moreover, just as Miss Masina's roles in earlier Fellini films called upon her to be sold into the circus and forced into prostitution, she now finds herself conned into coming back, against her better judgment, by her broken-down former dancing partner.
- Unlock more free articles.
And the traumas of the circus and the humiliations of prostitution are nothing compared to the grotesqueries of the world of popular television, as conceived by Mr. Fellini. Yet, at the end of ''Ginger and Fred,'' as always, Giulietta Masina is still smiling, jauntily mugging her way through life - just the way she seems to do offscreen.
The torrent of words comes through a persistent cloud of cigarette smoke as she speaks of her past and present in her elegant Via Margutta apartment. But when the words stop and an aperture opens in the smoke, there is the famous smile.
Now 65 years old, she says she doesn't mind a bit that when people think of of Giulietta Masina, they imagine her still as the waiflike Gelsomina of ''La Strada.'' When she speaks of the film, it is clear that for her, to be remembered for association with one great film is satisfaction enough for a lifetime.
''If an actress has the luck to do an important film with an important director, and in an important role,'' she says, ''it's natural that it remains.''
''La Strada'' seems to follow her everywhere. ''Four years ago I was coming back from San Francisco,'' she recalls. ''On the way back I stopped in New York. That night I stayed at the hotel because I was tired. And in my room, I switched on the TV and started changing channels, and after few channels what do I see: 'La Strada.' '' And she adds, with a touch of delight and pride - and a criticism that could come straight out of ''Ginger and Fred,'' - it was ''full of advertisements.''
It is no accident that Miss Masina has maintained a certain consistency in the roles she has played. After ''La Strada,'' a 1954 release and an Oscar-winner in 1956 as the best foreign film, it was difficult, even frightening, to contemplate other roles.
''Success also means being careful not to make mistakes because you develop a certain kind of fear,'' she says. ''You are scared to accept roles which are different. You are scared that you will cancel the success you had. You are scared to disappoint the critics and the public.
''And so,'' she says, ''sometimes I refused roles which I am now convinced I could do very well, but they were very different characters.
''The public had seen me like Gelsomina, like a clown, and then in 'Cabiria,' '' she says, referring to her role as a prostitute. ''To see me in a realistic role, as a wife with her husband and her lover, I don't know how the public would have reacted, accepted that.''
She chuckles, as she often does, explaining why it wasn't hard to turn down other roles. ''They don't pay me like Al Pacino or De Niro,'' she says.
The result is that she has had major roles in but nine major films during the last three decades, though she is well known in Italy for her career on television. She has chosen to fill the rest of her life with work for Unicef, a decade's worth of work on a ''Dear Abby''-like newspaper column, and trying to tend to Mr. Fellini, her husband for 42 years of complex but enduring relationship.
''First of all I run my house,'' she says. ''Federico is not too demanding, but let's say I spoil him a bit like a good Italian woman.''
But as she tells it, the whole idea of ''Ginger and Fred'' came up as part of a broader project designed precisely to change the image of women in Italian film.
Miss Masina was thinking of doing television productions - despite the theme of ''Ginger and Fred,'' she is fond of television - of six short films on six modern feminine characters, directed by six different directors: ''a housewife, a lawyer, a nurse, a crazy one, and so on.''
The idea the series was designed to counter, she said, was that Italian women seem to be associated with just one thing.
''The woman in movies was always the girl that falls in love, makes love and so forth,'' she said. ''I think there are different women in society who work, live in their society, who are teachers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, ministers, members of parliament, and who deal with other things and not only with 'that' thing.
''There's nothing wrong with 'that,' '' she laughs, ''but there are other things in life.''
One of the characters for the series was ''Ginger,'' she says, and Alberto Grimaldi, the producer, insisted that Mr. Fellini make a separate film about her. And so he did.
Mr. Fellini, it turns out, has much the same image of his wife as does the rest of the world. In his view, she was an inevitable Ginger.
''The idea, the little script of the film, was born in her,'' Mr. Fellini says, ''on that emotional mixture of stubbornness, optimism, faith, childlike enthusiasm, with good sense and the concreteness of daily life.''
Mr. Fellini says that his wife sometime resists his view of her talents, which he summarizes as ''a mingling of youngish and clownish.''But make no mistake: in suggesting that his wife is a clown, Mr. Fellini means no insult.''The clown is the aristocracy of acting,'' he says. ''To be a clown means to have the possibility of making people cry and laugh.''
Yet working for your husband as director - especially, it seems, if it is Mr. Fellini - is clearly not the easiest thing in the world.''It's much easier with another director,'' Miss Masina says with a chuckle. ''I feel freer, as strange as it may seem.
''I would like to understand him immediately, without his explaining, and he wants me to understand,'' she goes on, ''and so I become defensive because I'm scared of making mistakes.
''Federico is a man who talks very little,'' she says. ''When I do well, the way he wants it, he knows immediately and lets me do it. But when he thinks I see things differently from him then it's more difficult.He wants the maximum from me.''
Mr. Fellini's description of working with Miss Masina backs up her account. ''At a certain point, Giulietta, as usually happens when she makes a film with me, starts resisting,'' Mr. Fellini says.
The success of Miss Masina's performance in ''Ginger and Fred'' lies partly in the fact that she seems constantly out of place, a smiling and loving woman in the midst of the zoo of Mr. Fellini's world of television.
Indeed, one aspect of the film is all the absurdities Mr. Fellini stuffs in - the ridiculous advertisements, costumes straight from a bad version of ''Star Trek,'' warped personalities who live only for public display, a troupe of dwarfs who dance the tango and flamenco, an emcee in a glittery sequin-studded, Liberace-style sports jacket who wears a pasted-on smile that vanishes the instant the red light of the television camera is extinguished.
Add to this Mr. Mastroianni, who wears the mask of a man near death and stumbles through his dance routine with the delicacy of a gorilla.
In the midst of such a world, the most throughly absurd character turns out to be the ever sane, ever optimistic Ginger.''In normality, there is the greatest abnormality,'' Miss Masina says. ''In fact Ginger, among all these crazy people, seems more abnormal than the others - all that curiosity, a character who keeps all her energy, while Marcello's character is tired, older inside.''
''Ginger appears as if she's always been the same,'' Miss Masina goes on, in another of those lines that seems applicable to her own life story, ''as if she were 20, with such enthusiasm, innocence. She is nervous, as if it were her debut, always tidy with her little hat.''
One of the hardest parts of the role, she says, is that Mr. Fellini insisted that she, too, make faux pas in her dancing routine.
''I've loved dancing since I was a child, and that's why I had so much fun,'' she says. ''I wanted to dance better, but Federico did not want me to, because with Marcello he wanted us to breathe heavily. He wanted us to make mistakes.''
Given Miss Masina's admiration for television, it is not suprising that she contradicts the European critics who see in ''Ginger and Fred'' a mordant attack on the medium. ''It is not 'hard' on television, she says. ''It's ironic. This film is not nasty.
''You have to see the errors of your society, but with a smile, without wickedness,'' she says.
Such a view of the world is certainly consistent with her role in her most recent film before ''Ginger and Fred.'' In ''Frau Holle,'' a Czechoslovak and West German co-production of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, she plays a white fairy, a kind of good witch who sends snow and rain and sunshine onto the earth.
Shown on Italian television after being well received at the Venice Film festival as a powerful, unpolemical tale for children - and for childlike adults - ''Frau Holle'' has not, outside Eastern Europe, received the exposure Miss Masina would like.
But in the end, the conversation keeps turning to ''La Strada,'' and one again glimpses an almost fearful humility in Miss Masina.
The initial Italian critical response to ''La Strada'' was less than she and Mr. Fellini had hoped for (although it was later overwhelmed by favorable reaction), and Miss Masina was truly frightened. ''Can you imagine my crisis?'' she asks. ''Because I thought I had ruined Federico.
''He had cast me as the main actress for this film, in a time when the 'maggiorate' were in fashion.'' Here she uses the Italian word for voluptuous beauty and physical characteristics associated with Sophia Loren or Dolly Parton.
''Well, I was small, thin,'' she says. ''The producers knew I was good from the theater, but thought that 'La Strada' was a dramatic film, jealousy and so on, and so they weren't sure of little, fragile me.''
But ''little, fragile me'' won out and survived. And yet Miss Masina still can't quite believe it was really her own doing.
Коментарі
Дописати коментар