Amarcord (1973)

(On Cable TV, March 2022) While Armacord is a bit too close to the bland neorealism of Fellini’s early career than the colourful expressionism of his later work, I’m sympathetic to this (semi-autobiographical) tale of a young man living his last year in a small Italian town before forever leaving for the big city. There’s fondness in the way the village is shown in its small quirks over the course of a year—its eccentric inhabitants, limited perspective and life under the fascist regime of mid-1930s Italy. My favourite sequence is probably the one going over the teen protagonists’ sexual fantasies while limited to their small-town surrounding: it’s funny, a bit crude, but surprisingly cute—at least if you’ve been a male teenager. While I don’t like Amarcord as much as some of the most exuberant latter-day Fellini in his non-realistic verve, it does feel a bit tighter, a bit more cohesive than his other films of that period. Its appeal will be closely linked to how much viewers want to spend time in a 1930s small Italian town… and then leave.