Fellini Roma. (15)
Directed by Federico Fellini.
Starring Peter Gonzalez. 1972. Out on Blu-ray from Eureka! Masters of Cinema,128 mins.
Seeing a fully restored version of any Fellini film post 8½ is generally a revelation: wow, it was actually meant to be that chaotic, disordered and nonsensical. Usually you will have seen them at some rep cinema and assumed that the muddle was down to them being given incomplete prints or the projectionist getting the reels mixed up.
Rome Open City is back in cinemas this week and Rossellini’s wartime film provided Fellini with an early screen credit as co-writer. A quarter of a century later, when he had graduated to name in the title pre-eminence (though the credits on the film simply call it Roma) he gave us his own vision of Rome, a ramble through history and memory, reality and fantasy. The premise is that this is a film essay: part reminiscence on his arrival in the capital as a young man from Rimini; part film within a film as we watch Fellini making a film about modern day Rome; and part any other Rome connected flight of fancy he came up with and felt like sticking in there. I’m not sure the film even sustains that slight notion: it’s just a bunch of stuff really.
The opening half hour, all scenes of his youth and Rome during the war, take some getting through. We get abrupt little snatches of his education in Rimini; the surrogate young Fellini (played by Gonzalez) adapting to life in Rome and hulking prostitutes on the edge of the city. These all pile on to the screen to create a gibbering mess that is supremely unengaging. There seems to be no order or sense to what we are seeing, as if it were just thrown together. Then after a half hour the film gets to its first great set piece: a recreation filmed in Cinecitta of a contemporary car journey into the city during a storm. It’s a marvellous, bawdy, cacophonous stunt and it effectively kickstarts the film, delivering us from the drab suburbs the film has languished in for its first quarter, and transporting us to the very heart of the action.
The rest of the film is really just a series of set pieces. The brothel sequences get a bit repetitive and the wartime variety show arguably drags on a bit too long, but almost everything else is archetypal Fellini, and top draw Fellini at that. The one everybody remembers is the Vatican fashion show, a sequence which you’d assume would be satirical but, thanks mainly to Nino Rota’s score, becomes something rather wistful and melancholic.
Last year’s big subtitled hit was Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, another celebration of the Eternal City which took inspiration from Fellini, especially La Dolce Vita and Roma. Now by any objective standards Sorrentino’s Roma is a superior piece of cinema to Fellini’s yet there is an unquantifiable essence to Fellini that means his films stay with you in a way that few others do.
At this point, immediately after Satyricon, Fellini was considered to be the foremost chronicler of decadence. The film contrasts the modern day hippies, seen sprawled across all these great monuments with the city's grand history, while Gore Vidal pops up to muse in a self-satisfied way about Rome being a good place to observe the end of the world from. The film’s journey from the austere 1940s city that Fellini arrived in to the decadent city of the 70s; the journey from Rome Open City to Rome Really Open City, is both Fellini’s and Italian cinema’s journey from neo realism to surrealism.
The Blu-ray is released by Eureka, as part of their Masters of Cinema series. It is the shorter European cut but does contain 20 minutes of deleted scenes.
Directed by Federico Fellini.
Starring Peter Gonzalez. 1972. Out on Blu-ray from Eureka! Masters of Cinema,128 mins.
Seeing a fully restored version of any Fellini film post 8½ is generally a revelation: wow, it was actually meant to be that chaotic, disordered and nonsensical. Usually you will have seen them at some rep cinema and assumed that the muddle was down to them being given incomplete prints or the projectionist getting the reels mixed up.
Rome Open City is back in cinemas this week and Rossellini’s wartime film provided Fellini with an early screen credit as co-writer. A quarter of a century later, when he had graduated to name in the title pre-eminence (though the credits on the film simply call it Roma) he gave us his own vision of Rome, a ramble through history and memory, reality and fantasy. The premise is that this is a film essay: part reminiscence on his arrival in the capital as a young man from Rimini; part film within a film as we watch Fellini making a film about modern day Rome; and part any other Rome connected flight of fancy he came up with and felt like sticking in there. I’m not sure the film even sustains that slight notion: it’s just a bunch of stuff really.
The opening half hour, all scenes of his youth and Rome during the war, take some getting through. We get abrupt little snatches of his education in Rimini; the surrogate young Fellini (played by Gonzalez) adapting to life in Rome and hulking prostitutes on the edge of the city. These all pile on to the screen to create a gibbering mess that is supremely unengaging. There seems to be no order or sense to what we are seeing, as if it were just thrown together. Then after a half hour the film gets to its first great set piece: a recreation filmed in Cinecitta of a contemporary car journey into the city during a storm. It’s a marvellous, bawdy, cacophonous stunt and it effectively kickstarts the film, delivering us from the drab suburbs the film has languished in for its first quarter, and transporting us to the very heart of the action.
The rest of the film is really just a series of set pieces. The brothel sequences get a bit repetitive and the wartime variety show arguably drags on a bit too long, but almost everything else is archetypal Fellini, and top draw Fellini at that. The one everybody remembers is the Vatican fashion show, a sequence which you’d assume would be satirical but, thanks mainly to Nino Rota’s score, becomes something rather wistful and melancholic.
Last year’s big subtitled hit was Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, another celebration of the Eternal City which took inspiration from Fellini, especially La Dolce Vita and Roma. Now by any objective standards Sorrentino’s Roma is a superior piece of cinema to Fellini’s yet there is an unquantifiable essence to Fellini that means his films stay with you in a way that few others do.
At this point, immediately after Satyricon, Fellini was considered to be the foremost chronicler of decadence. The film contrasts the modern day hippies, seen sprawled across all these great monuments with the city's grand history, while Gore Vidal pops up to muse in a self-satisfied way about Rome being a good place to observe the end of the world from. The film’s journey from the austere 1940s city that Fellini arrived in to the decadent city of the 70s; the journey from Rome Open City to Rome Really Open City, is both Fellini’s and Italian cinema’s journey from neo realism to surrealism.
The Blu-ray is released by Eureka, as part of their Masters of Cinema series. It is the shorter European cut but does contain 20 minutes of deleted scenes.
