Word: fellini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FEILINI LONG AGO secured his place in the film patheon, and even so imperfect a film as Roma doesn't begin to jeopardize that, Roma, it is safe to say, will neither add to nor detract from Fellini's reputation. Its successes are as large as its failures are obtrusive. It is, in short, an astonishingly inconsistent film whose hits manage to outnumber its misses, but only just barely...
...from as completely realized a scene as this. Fellini turns blithely to a tiresome sequence of a festival in Trastivere that culminates in a staged police bust of students. The camera crew then 'happens' across Gore Vidal, pontificating on the Decline and Fall of the Western world Fellini has run out of subject matter here; he has nothing in particular to say but innumerable ways of saying it. The film has no narrative, character, theme or even central emotion around which to structure events; it runs on the whimsy of the Fellini imagination. When that strikes fertile ground, there...
...that Fellini's nemesis is reality itself, finally grown bizarre enough to challenge his imagination. So he strains to outdo the exotica of everyday reality, and in the straining finds himself an alien in the modern world. He doesn't know quite what to make of industrial advance, youth culture, and political ferment. He stares at those phenomena with confusion and regret and would willingly retreat to the more secure confusion of more hallucination...
...exasperating, a rococo grandeur that has grown somehow galling, for it is the disease of a talent bankrupt for substance. Fellini has lost his sense of connection. The camera flits over the poverty-ridden, the deformed, the filth and litter of fascism and war, turning the plagues of Rome into perverse filmic display...
...Fellini finds the decay exhilarating and embraces impending doom beneath the surface. In the final sequence a troop of goggled motorcyclists roar through the rubbish of Rome on a joyride, anonymous heralds of catastrophe. Fellini whirls his camera through the city on one last dazzling tour before speeding off, after the cyclists, out of the cuts into the darkness, greeting the apocalypse with an empty grin...