Jess and I rarely get to watch a movie together because with two children—4 years and 2 months—one of us is always either too tired or on deadline, but last night we got on the same page and watched Fellini’s La Strada.

We both love Fellini. Jess was an Italian minor in college and can actually understand the rapid-fire dialogue between the characters, sometimes she laughs a little at a subtitle’s awkward translation. On the other hand, my sad, half-assed background in Spanish allows me to maybe pluck out a cognate here and there.

My love of Fellini began in a college class dedicated solely to Fellini and Bergman taught by Fellini scholar Donald Costello, a generous but hard-nosed teacher who taught us to “read” film as closely as we might a book rich with complex characters, themes, motifs, and symbols; in other words, to regard the director as we might an author, to appreciate the choices a director makes and to analyze the effects of these choices.

Many of the students in the class thought Costello was pompous, that he “read way too much into things.” To me, any pomposity was actually his deep care for and love of Fellini’s work. For Costello, the work was engaged in telling stories that grappled with Man’s core preoccupations: love and sex, suffering and death, finding meaning amidst chaos.

For a long time, that class spoiled the movie-going experience for me. I couldn’t just watch a movie, I had to take in apart and put it back together again. In fact, I still have a hard time with most of what Hollywood offers—films with flimsy, sentimental plots, whose success rests on the familiarity and beauty of the face mugging for the camera, not to mention millions in special effects and explosives.

The opening minutes of La Strada stand in stark contrast to the popular movies of today, which often begin with a highly produced opening credits sequence. La Strada begins with Gelsomina walking over a small dune toward the sea. She looks the very epitome of peasantry with a stack of kindling strapped to her back.

Soon her brothers and sisters come running toward her calling out her name “Gelsomina! Gelsomina.” They tell her that a man on a big motorcycle has arrived with the news that her sister, Rosa, is dead. Back at her quaint house we see the menacing strong man Zamapno (Anthony Quinn) leaning against a post smoking a cigarette. We discover that Rosa was Zampano’s assistant, and her body has not been returned.

When the camera lights on Gelsomina (played by Fellini’s wife Gulietta Masina) for the first time, she looks distraught and pale. She says nothing, makes no sound at all, as her mother negotiates her sale to Zampano for 10,000 lire. One glance at this tableaux—the hulking Zampano and the pathetic peasant, Gelsomina—and your heart breaks.

But Gelsomina is not merely a victim of poverty. There is, as so many critics have pointed out, something special about her. It’s something that I’ve never been able to put my finger on. She is childlike in her wonder and concern for others. Some have described her clownish or Chaplin-esque in her exaggerated facial expressions and the way she ambles about.

In one moment, dancing in a barren field, she comes across a sapling that is as small and pathetic as she is. She looks at it and then gracefully, without hesitation, contorts her body to mimic its shape. In another moment, waiting for Zampano to sleep off the previous night’s bender during which he abandoned her for a woman they meet at a restaurant, she plants some tomato seeds.

In these and other moments, Gelsomina seems to have some sort of connection to the earth. It would be cliché and incorrect to say that she is the “salt of the earth,” because she lighter and more airy than that. Despite her wretched lot in life, sold into servitude by her mother, living in a wagon pulled by a motorcycle, she has an innate joy about her.

After watching the film, we watched a special feature in which Martin Scorsese discusses the film and its importance to him. In it he puts his finger exactly on Gelsomina’s ineffable quality. He says that the film embodies the Franciscan ethic of kindness and care for all creation, including someone like Zampano who in the course of the film kills a man and then abandons Gelsomina who, having witnessed the killing, is grief-stricken to the point of catatonia.

In fact, though the film seems to about Gelsomina and how her indomitable spirit, the film ends with Zampano crumbling beneath the weight of his guilt. The scene is actually quite Flannery O’Connor-esque in that we get the sense that Zampano, despite his cruelty and dissolute lifestyle is perhaps undergoing a moment of grace.

And while La Strada is one of the movies you have to be in the mood for, it is now a film that I think I will watch more often. Gelsomina’s example is one that we would all do well to imitate, especially in this world full of Zampanos.