Word: fellinis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...preening, actors and actresses, whores and Catholics His young provincial gapes at a boarding house harem of freaks: a bloated beauty in raven locks, a garrulous has-been actor, and the lady of the house, a mound of spongy gray flesh-presiding over it all like some claphantine idol Fellini lingers nostalgically over the bizarre figures of his youth. The inevitable bulging whores strut before an ogling crowd; gesticulating Italians gorge themselves at a gala outdoor banquet. The bordellos, churches, and cafes can't contain these Romans. and they spill out into the streets, faces twisted into the shapes...
...Fellini's emotional center is in the past, and he feasts on the frivolity of his Romans. He re-creates Jovinelli, a proletarian vaudeville, and here the Romans for the first time take over a film rightfully theirs. The ribald workmen are hungry for sex and sentiment. They drool at drooling dancers, swoon at the strains of middle-aged tarts, and taunt the futility of a fourth-rate comic. Vaudeville was a battle between this brawling crowd and their amateur entertainers, to which Mussolini and his war were secondary attractions...
...Then Fellini's attention turns again, and he makes a feeble attempt at wartime documentary. The cater-wauling crowd scuttles at the sound of an air-raid siren, while the camera cuts to a panicked woman running down a deserted Roman street as shells explode in the distance. But every time Fellini comes close to confronting political reality, he shies away and returns with relief to the philandering life of Rome. He is content with an imaginative evocation of the sordidness of fascist Italy, but anything like explanation or analysis is far removed from this documentary...
PERHAPS THE MOST embarassing scene in a film of too many embarassing scenes is a stagey confrontation between director Fellini and a contingent of radical students who insist that the film include an economic analysis of the ills of contemporary Rome. Fellini smiles disarmingly and mutters something about the need to address personal problems before tackling social crises. Maybe no one has a more interesting subjectivity to indulge than Fellini, but self-indulgence on this grand scale tends toward incoherence. This is personal journalism driven to the limit, the reporter reporting himself. And, inevitably, Romabecomes a film of moments, some...
...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...