Frederico Fellini

  • Roma (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) As a love letter to a city, Frederico Fellini’s Roma is a big collage of impressions, striking scenes and impressionistic takes. The plot is optional—there’s some attempt to have a young man represent Fellini as he moves to the big city from a small town and discovers the capital in its effervescent glory, but that conceit gets lost as Fellini moves through his set-pieces, in the street or under the ground. The film spans fifty years from the 1930s (and its fascist regime) to the 1970s, with various set-pieces including brothel visits, a trip underground, a vaudeville performance, traffic jam and a haute-couture parade. It’s not top Fellini, but I have to say that I was kept entertained by his late-career unwillingness to stick to any kind of mimetic reality. It’s very colourful, weird, over-the-top and as such a welcome improvement over the neorealism of Fellini’s early career. This being said, I’m the kind of viewer who would have liked more plotting to go with the flashes of cinematic inspiration—perhaps a more strongly structured trip through the decades through the eye of an aging character, perhaps more depth to the human characters. I can tolerate the results well enough, but I was getting antsy by Roma’s final minutes, and even recognizing that Fellini basically did whatever he wanted at that stage of his career isn’t quite enough to soothe more straight-minded viewers.

  • I vitelloni (1953)

    I vitelloni (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2021) I’m a big fan of early-phase Fellini— too mimetic, too dull, too realistic for my tastes. I vitelloni, being the adventures of four young men yearning to get out of their small Italian town, is clearly in the neorealist vein, but you can already see some of the flamboyance that would characterize and distinguish later-phase Fellini. As a slice-of-life kind of film (until the protagonist gets a revelation and acts on it), there are fun parts and not-so-fun ones. My appreciation for I vitelloni is limited, but that goes for pretty much all of Italian neorealism.

  • Giulietta degli spiriti [Juliet of the Spirits] (1965)

    Giulietta degli spiriti [Juliet of the Spirits] (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) One of the hidden superpowers of being a movie reviewer is the ability to switch gears in appreciating a film when chunks of it don’t work. Writer-director Frederico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits is a typical Fellini: stylish and oneiric but not concerned about narrative values. It’s about a homely middle-aged housewife (Giulietta Masina, she of previous Fellini films such as La Strada and Nights of Cabiria) who discovers her husband’s infidelity and, though vivid reveries, musters up the courage to do something about it. Notable for being Fellini’s first colour film, Juliet of the Spirits shows the filmmaker fully indulging in the rich possibilities of colour for visual impact; paradoxically, it’s also a film deeply influenced by black-and-white cinematography, as many scenes—including the opening—are set in deep shadows. (This doesn’t always work to the film’s advantage, as the nighttime shots are grainy even as the daytime sequences are far more detailed.)  Considering the film’s frequent recourse to daydreams, it’s not a surprise if the narrative fabric of the film is thin and almost inconsequent: both the lead character and the film become alive when steeped into fantasy. At some point, I frankly stopped caring about the characters or the story and started focusing on the filmmaking technique used in the film. Fortunately, this is Fellini we’re talking about: there’s always something to see — including an amazing shot in which the camera looks at a mirror, sees the main character, pans to the character, then pans back to the mirror showing something else in a visually seamless but technically complex ballet. I didn’t feel much connection to the characters or the actors: while there’s some narratively effective material in the film’s last quarter, much of the film is primarily designed for visual impact. The female characters are, with the exception of the lead character, dressed and made-up in gaudy unattractive caricatures, heightening the lack of reality of the proceedings. But to be fair, I prefer seeing a meaningless visual fest over gritty cinema-verité, so I still got something out of Juliet of the Spirits despite not liking it a lot. Of course, I know what to expect with Fellini — I’m not sure I would have been so lenient had this been my first film of his, nor if it had been executed as neorealism.