Word: fellini
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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...
...orgy of Vatican decay, crowned finally by the entrance of the Pope himself, ossified and immobile, wheeled in on a huge golden throne, as the audience erupts in hair-pulling paroxysms of faith. But more is involved here than the obvious satiric bite. On the far side of sacrilege. Fellini has made an uneasy peace with the Church, ignoring questions of dogma, celebrating the wildest extremes of artifice. Ornate trappings, once the symbol of Church power, are now the tomb of its ruined power...
...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...