Word: fellini
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...most recent film, Fellini Roma, Fellini occasionally has members of the cast step out from the tapestry to address his audience, like Anna Magnani as she reaches the door to her apartment and bids us all good night. In Amarcord Fellini plays around further with this device; along with the exquisite diction of the Italian actors and the rhythm and beauty and strangeness (to the English ear) of what they are saying, this lends a theatrical, almost ritualistic quality to the film. These characters, though, are faintly ridiculous. By stepping out of the community to address us, they forfeit...
Amarcord has no plot. Like Roma, it is a "portrait" of a city, with no particular story to tell. But because the emphasis is on the simplicity of the city rather than its complications, Amarcord seems much more structured and homogeneous than Roma. It's also less daring. Fellini takes no chances, and it's his holding back that's responsible for the lack of any sequence as creative as the transforming of the traffic jam in Roma from urban ugliness to post-industrial beauty, a change much more convincing than anything in Amarcord. In Roma...
...FELLINI'S BENEFICENT world has no visible social underpinnings. In one scene, some bricklayers building a house pause as one of the workers steps forward to recite a short "poem." "My grandfather laid bricks all his life," he says. "My father did the same. I have laid bricks all my life. But where is my house?" The question doesn't need to be answered; the worker is one of Fellini's eccentrics, tolerated in a good-natured way but not respected. Aurelio's wife locks him inside the house on the day II Duce comes to speak...
...political evil hardly scratches the surface of life here, neither do Fellini's large doses of insanity. Uncle Teo climbs a tree and refuses to come down until ordered to do so by a midget nun who will have none of his nonsense. A peddler claims that one night a diminutive arab sheik checked into the grand hotel with his harem and invited him up for a tiring evening. Even the priests are allowed to join Fellini's beatific vision. Foolish as the churchmen are, Aurelio's termagant wife turns out to be the genuine image of sainthood...
...content with making movies, Fellini seems determined to create a whole new world along with each new film--not a distorted reproduction of some world that is or has been, but a fresh-from-the-forehead-of-the-creator god world with its own pleasures, values and idiosyncracies. At first, Fellini seemed to be creating the same world over and over again; lately he appears to be wandering around, establishing new earths in whatever image strikes his fancy. There are a few things common to them all, though; a Fellini world is one where the fantastic is commonplace and madness...