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Inside "Signore Regista," cp. Sullivan's Travels. The artist is a suffocated driver or a tethered balloon, mainly he's a blocked filmmaker at a lavish spa, mineral water is recommended. Guido the Big Liar, with no ideas under his black cowboy hat but blessed with Marcello Mastroianni's elegant irony. A subject is needed for his new project, "the Italian Catholic consciousness," why not, everyone floats in it. Sharp wife (Anouk Aimée) and frowzy mistress (Sandra Milo) drop by, so does the Muse in white (Claudia Cardinale) as reality folds into memory folds into dream. An incantation from childhood, when confessional booths looked like space pods and the Eternal Feminine was first glimpsed as a mountainous rumbaing temptress. The produttore (Guido Alberti) begs for footage while the screenwriter (Jean Rougeul) quotes Mallarmé's terror of the blank page, the exorbitant set is mere scaffolding for a cosmic glass painting. "Of all your story's overabundant symbols, this is the worst." How to follow up La Dolce Vita, or, rather, how to wrestle with the colossal fame and scrutiny that follow it? One director's harried cinematic paralysis met by another's boundless cinematic fertility, Federico Fellini's comedy of creative anxiety and ecstasy, a record of a film being made. The flowing camera is a dilation from Minnelli (Fellini repays the compliment of Two Weeks in Another Town), angular and bulbous faces bob to the Nino Rota rhythm. The monsignor chides Guido for casually mixing the sacred and the profane, everyone's a critic, his own imaginary harem is in upheaval. The epiphany is a candid testament in place of an apocalyptic epic, life and art are a dance that are not just directed but joined. "Don't tell me you love movies where nothing happens?" Responses include The Music Lovers, Day for Night, O Lucky Man!, The Other Side of the Wind... Cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo. With Rossella Falk, Barbara Steele, Mario Pisu, Madeleine Lebeau, Caterina Boratto, Yvonne Casadei, Eddra Gale, Ian Dallas, Giuditta Rissone, and Annibale Ninchi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |