Fellini's Roma
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He offers us a series of vignettes all connected--more or less--to the autobiographical character of a film director (named Fellini) making a film about Rome, complete with self-reflexive debates about what sort of film to make and what to include: glimpses inside of two old-fashioned Roman brothels (the expensive and the cheap), a group of construction workers digging a metro line, the discovery of ancient Roman frescoes which begin to disappear a few moments after they're uncovered, a warren-like maze of a boarding house full of odd characters, and best of all, a Papal fashion show.
Some of the scenes satirizing Roman manners (if that's the right word) may be a bit too specific for a non-Italian audience: a long, drawn-out scene in a busy neighborhood restaurant and another at a rowdy old-fashioned vaudeville performance may still please viewers with their surreal inventiveness, but the object of their satire--Roman eating habits and communal behavior--might be lost on an audience not intimately familiar with the Rome of the 1960s. Also, his portrait of a city overrun with hippies seems a bit dated
But in the end, the city of Rome is the perfect love-object for Fellini, and his perfect film subject: a strange and infinitely-faceted palimpsest of images and memories whose complexity and mystery only grow in the imagination and with the passage of time.
FilmStocker Rating: A-
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