Word: fellinis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ORCHESTRA REHEARSAL Directed and Written by Federico Fellini...
...burnt-out visions of the catastrophic Casanova behind him, Federico Fellini has returned to film making in a new guise. Orchestra Rehearsal, a 70-minute movie originally made for Italian television, marks Fellini's debut as a political artist. Perhaps the change was inevitable. This director's latent pessimism matches perfectly the gloomy social landscape of chaotic contemporary Italy. Or so one might hope. In Rehearsal, Fellini is so enthralled by his polemic that he forgets to let his imagination take flight. A film that should have been his equivalent to Godard's Weekend or Wertmuller...
...Fellini's crucial error is his movie's governing conceit. Rehearsal is built on a single, restrictive metaphor: the notion that a symphony orchestra can stand as a paradigm of society as a whole. Set entirely in a lovely 13th century oratory, the film ostensibly describes the rehearsal of an unnamed piece by the late film composer Nino Rota. But very quickly Fellini bends his dramatic situation into a cautionary tale about the dangers of anarchy. The musicians begin by goofing off and refusing to play together; then they break into open, violent revolt against their German conductor...
Curiously, British Playwright Tom Stoppard has used the same metaphor to make essentially the same point in his Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), a 70-minute theater piece for actors and orchestra. Stoppard enlivened his schematic political lesson with wit, and so, at times, does Fellini. In the film's first half, a visiting TV documentary team interviews the musicians and gets a lively response. A flutist turns a cartwheel. A drummer attacks the piano as a "chatterbox." An insomniac trumpeter confides that with his instrument, "a clinker is death." Once anarchy takes hold, however, the idiosyncratic individuals...
...teen-ager can be. Except for this one quirk: though his background is middle-class and Middle Western-strictly white bread-he has taken to speaking with a heavy Italian accent. From his room comes the sound of Italian opera and language lessons, he has renamed the family cat Fellini, and induced his mother to cook what his father disgustedly calls "ini" food-zucchini, linguini, that sort of thing...