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The petrified divine gaze in the heights and the swollen piscine gaze from the depths, in between there's the entire panoply of modern decay. "A land of ancient beliefs" and a city of glittering fads, Rome. Not quite journalism, not quite literature, the condition of the gossip scribe (Marcello Mastroianni) who's strayed from his best qualities, clarity and passion. Up the Vatican tower and down into the Trevi Fountain with the visiting Hollywood bombshell (Anita Ekberg), "a big doll" quizzed at the press conference. ("Do you think Italian neorealism is dead or alive?") He meanders with the faux-Marilyn and gets punched by a former Tarzan, a typical night at the Via Veneto. Miracles are media events, so it goes with children and a vision of the Madonna, a superproduction of cameras and torches and rain dilated from Wilder's Ace in the Hole. (Numerous works are cited as impressions throughout, from In a Lonely Place and The Bad and the Beautiful to The Barefoot Contessa and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) "Basta, paparazzo!" Swank and sterility for days, Federico Fellini's turning point from narrative to kaleidoscopic state of mind. A prostitute's bed rented for the bored heiress (Anouk Aimée), a rush to the hospital with the suicidal mistress (Yvonne Furneaux). The sham stability of the bourgeois intellectual (Alain Cuny), whose plight is to be "too serious to be an amateur, but not enough to be a professional" and whose untimely tragedy is catnip to shutterbugs on mopeds. Fitzgerald multiplied by Joyce, piercing, tender, as exhausting as it needs to be. Visit to the Cha-Cha Club with Dad (Annibale Ninchi) (cf. Osborne's The Entertainer), giggly séances (plus a foreglimpse of L'Année dernière à Marienbad) at the old castle. "Our parties are famous for being first-class funerals." Draggy orgy into beach hangover, the blonde angel's mysterious close-up concurrent with À bout de souffle. Cinematography by Otello Martelli. With Magali Noël, Walter Santesso, Lex Barker, Nadia Gray, Riccardo Garrone, Jacques Sernas, Laura Betti, Nico, and Valeria Ciangottini. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |