From the Shelf: Amarcord (1973, Federico Fellini)
Acquired: May of 2007, from Amazon.
Seen before?: No.
A flashback crafted as only Fellini could. Loosely structured around a handful of characters, notably towheaded teen Titta and temptress-in-red Gradisca, this details a year in the life of an Italian village. Mussolini is in power, yet while Fascism is a part of the lives of the citizens (and there’s a terrific setpiece involving a Fascist parade and an enormous bust of Mussolini), it doesn’t seem to have a large effect on their day-to-day existence, maybe because they’re too busy living their lives or maybe because it’s a comment on what we choose to remember when we look back on past times. We remember that which stands out, and for, say, a young man deeply in the throes of puberty, whether or not the woman down the street was a loyal Fascist would occupy less space in your mental storehouse than the time the local tobacconist shoved your face into her massive breasts.
Its status as an explicit memory piece gives a certain weight to the Fellini gallery of grotesques. If these people are extravagant caricatures, if they walk around with leers carved on their faces like statues, it’s because they’re frozen in a certain time by the narrative and narrator(s). Did Volpina, the local prostitute, spend her every waking minute hunting men and carrying a look on her face that spoke of deep, insatiable hungers? Probably not, but that’s the image that gets burned in precisely because it’s so indelible. The mundane fades while the outsized and the unusual holds fast; to understand what this film does and why is, potentially, to understand the whole of Fellini’s work. It’s a film of moments, of incidents and beautiful images and great galloping desires splattered across an immense canvas. There’s room in here for the ridiculous and the serene, the extravagant and the understated, the terrifying and the joyful and the tragic (sometimes all at once, because such is life). There are parts and pieces here - the epic snowstorm near the film’s end and the peacock that happens along, the thick and unyielding fog in autumn - that get as close to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s intoxicating magic realism as nobody else in cinema has. Reflect on what a Fellini-directed adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera would look like. Then reflect on the fact that the adaptation that actually exists was made by Mike Newell. Then reflect on why that should make any sane person weep bitterly.
Up next: Boris, he’s my prime mate…
