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Italia the fatherland, Roma la grandiosa madre. Federico Fellini's Eternal City fugue is neither remembrance ("Oh, you and your damned Proust!") nor documentary (the craning camera supposedly capturing a rain-spattered traffic jam is actually orchestrating it), images are instead arranged in movable blocks that ebb and flow in a sea of impressionistic lava. The Rome of Romulus and Remus, "la Lupa," Caesar and Il Duce. Ancient gladiators on the silver screen, Messalina the pharmacist's wife, inflamed in the theater. The city is a fleshy, garrulous, perspiring, raspberry-blowing beast, the filmmaker is the resplendent teenager drinking it all in and the middle-aged ringleader who's seen it fall and rise a few times. Taking a break from shooting, Fellini is questioned by old guards demanding a gorgeous portrait and young turks insisting on addressing modern problems. He prefers to revisit the Variety Lights music hall, now Bacchus-swollen—shabby Hollywood impersonators before a razzing audience, "a cross between the Circus Maximus and a brothel," an air raid brings down the curtain. (Like disintegrating frescoes in the exhumed necropolis, it's a vanished art.) "Free love," as opposed to the cheap-grotesque whorehouse and the fancy-grotesque whorehouse, the naughty boy who grows up to stage a fashion-show for papal pageantry. "The world must follow the church, not vice versa," cf. Russell's The Devils. The communal sidewalk banquet, the hippie Valhalla on the Spanish Steps, the police raid in the piazza... Gore Vidal raises a toast to the apocalypse, Anna Magnani turns down an interview. "Federico, go get some sleep!" At last silent at night, the city is overrun by a motorcycle stampede: The new barbarians? All roads lead to Rome, Fellini manages to pull them together into the magnificent image of the Amazonian prostitute in the foggy route, exhausted but unsinkable. Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno.
--- Fernando F. Croce |