Word: fellinis
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...cast--and dialogue--are international enough to put Cafe Pamplona to shame. Oleg Yankovsky plays a Russian poet named Gortchakov, who is in Italy to write a book about a 17th-century composer, Gortchakov is accompanied by an interpreter, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano). Like Fellini, another comsummate stylist, Tarkovsky seems to have chosen his cast primarily for their visual qualities--particularly Giordano, who has the Surrealist-Madonna looks to complement the Surrealist-pastoral scenery forming the backbone of this film...
...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...