Fellini and Farewell

I haven’t been posting as regularly this month, and will be away altogether for several weeks, but my commitment to Cinema Salon is definitely not waning, so please bookmark this site and return to it as new features take shape in the fall. In preparation for an absurdly uncharacteristic excursion to Italy, in the face of the August sun and heat, the tourists and the terrorists, as well as my crotchety Thoreauvian passion for my own little corner of the world, I have been re-watching a lot of Italian movies lately, in a half-assed attempt to absorb the language.

Rossellini’s Open City was definitely worth watching again, if mostly for the heroism of its making in the waning days of WWII and as the herald of the neorealist movement in film history. It’s powerful, important, and influential -- but not the greatest movie you've never seen.

I’ve always been ambivalent about Fellini. Outside of the incontrovertible masterpiece, 8 1/2, I tend to like his less regarded films more, and his more ballyhoo-ed films less. His first film remains my favorite -- The White Sheik (1951) holds up very well after many years, and even after long-ago frame-by-frame analysis it still delights and amuses me, with the mismatched newlyweds, Leopold Trieste and Brunella Bova, on a pilgrimage to Rome, him to meet family and pope, her to rendezvous with the man of her dreams, Alberto Sordi as the seedy sheik of the fumetti, popular photographic comic books.

I never shared the critical fervor for Fellini’s next film, I Vitelloni (1953), and I remain lukewarm to it overall, though there are certainly many marvelous moments in this group portrait of a circle of aging young layabouts in a provincial seaside town. There is a vein of memory and spectacle that Fellini will mine for the rest of his career, but the film assumes a sympathy for the gang of guys, as weak and hapless as they may be, that compromises the satire with sentiment. It’s complex and flavorful, but not to my taste ultimately, though the model for so many films about guys hanging out together.

Somehow I had managed to miss the iconic La Dolce Vita (1960), except for some of the famous clips like Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain. I was a furtive, impressionable teenager when it first came out, and I remember sneaking peeks at the drugstore paperback that had pictures of the infamous striptease sequence. Later, without seeing it, the film became fixed in my mind as a betrayal of neorealism, and another instance of the wearysome “sick soul of Europe” films of the time. Now that I have seen it, it is indeed all of that, a sprawling spectacle of the celebrity culture to come, again with superlative scenes of sweep and scope, again marred by uncertain sympathies and significance. Marcello Mastrioanni is reliably engaging as the tabloid journalist who pines for his literary roots, but is fully immersed in a world of manufactured media events and posing party-goers. The men are nasty and the women are incomprehensible, all glamour and indulgent self-destruction, as is the movie itself in the end.

I’ll be seeing you at the movies -- again -- after I get back from Italy. Arrivederci.