Word: fellini
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...added to this list is Federico Fellini's "And the Ship Sails On", a dreamy, allegorical film set in the tension-filled days of August 1914, when the European continent girded for its first encounter with modern warfare. The film, Fellini's fifteenth, is an adult fairy tale gone bad. The story takes place aboard a luxury liner somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea with a group of passengers representing Europe's elite. This array of artists and nobles have gathered for the scattering of the ashes of a renowned opera star named Edmea Tetua whom they all knew at some...
Sidestepping any human drama, Fellini strives to give the film an other-worldly quality, embellishing the opulence, dress and mannerisms of the time. And indeed he does produce an aesthetically pleasing picture. In the process the director creates a distance between the audience and the film, as if the audience were watching a group portrait from the turn of the century...
...dimensionality of the characters is the movie's greatest shortcoming. Although they may be mere caricatures, they nevertheless appear human enough to arouse the audience's interest, even if only for their peculiarity. But Fellini, alas never satisfies that interest. The connections between the passengers and the ashes in the urn remain unclear all through. "And the Ship Sails On," and the burial seems little else than the director's pretext for gathering a bunch of people on a doomed ship. The funeral's insignificance convinces the audience that something else must happen, a lack of subtlety that mars...
With "And the Ship Sails On," Fellini holds up a picture only to have a terrible fist punch right through it. But because so little is known about what and who has been destroyed, the sense of loss felt cannot be very great...
...Fellini is not overly sentimental or insistent on this point; he is mostly having too much fun with the giddy life of the voyage. Much of the amusement has to do with unfortunate encounters between the foolish passengers, who like to believe that they have transcended the instinctual life, and the lower animal kingdom. There is, for example, the seagull that invades the dining salon, flapping everyone into hysteria. Then there is the matter of the Emir's pet rhinoceros, languishing in the hold and giving off a most unpleasant stench. Seasick, any reasonable person might suppose; lovesick...