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(More customer reviews)Opening narration: "The film you are about to see does not have a story in the traditional sense with a neat plot and characterss that you can follow from the beginning to the end. This pictures tells another kind of story--the story of a city." And Fellini gives a loving, sometimes poking playful commentary, at times tragic portrait of Rome from his time as a boy in Fascist Italy to 1972, when this film was made.
Rome. As in Romulus and Remus, the river Tiber, Julius Caesar, the Colisseum, it's a city steeped in history as a great empire that rose and fell, and the film starts with Caesar and the crossing of the Rubicon, and how he is still revered in school. There is even a statue of Caesar in his town: "apart from his usefulness to the pigeons, he was a common meeting place for the town."
Speaking of common meeting places, there are two scenes where that aspect is emphasized. Fellini recalls of the apartment block where he stayed for a while, agog at the various characters, crying children, scolding mothers, etc. Eating was taken seriously, and who ate? Kids, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents, friends, friends of friends... there must have been at least a hundred or so people at the dinner feast. As one woman tells him, "They say eat alone, the devil cheers. Eat with friends, the devil jeers." The table is rife with complaints, insults, greetings, even a little girl who sings an obscene song, eliciting laughter and scandalized looks. Similarly, there is the Festa De Noantri, the Festival Of Ourselves, where the Romans celebrate themselves, and the celebrants are either long-time residents or people who thought they were passing by and stayed forever. The term "carnival-of-life" has been used to describe Fellini's movies, and this is very true here.
Fellini's film unit visually "describe[s] the entry into thecity via the ring of motorways that surrounds her [Rome] like a Saturn of rings." The scene of the modern super highway speaks of the tragic toll industrialization has taken, and the raining deluge adds to the misery. Hitchhikers, prostitutes, cement trucks, even a tank and a guy pushing a cart, highway patrol, communist student protesters, insane bumper to bumper traffic, and the most tragic scene, an overturned and burning truck-trailer, dead cows littering the road, firefighters fighting the blaze. Yet history does rear its head. Plans to make a Roman subway is halted and delayed because of the unpredictable Roman subsoil. "Every 100 yards, you come across something of historical importance." The workers have to learn speleology and archaeology as a result. And when will the subway be done? Who knows?
At a wartime variety show, an intellectual-looking member of the audience remarks, "We are seeing basic humanity here. Vaudeville is the arena of mass aggressiveness, a combination circus and brothel." Given the rowdiness of certain coarse members of the audience who heckle at comics or whistle at the girls, that's true enough. But might that not also be a commentary on Rome and maybe any large city?
There's also the pleasant enough handsome Peter Gonzalez portraying the young Fellini and we see the look of 1930's Rome through his eyes. Interesting images and characters underpoint any Fellini film and this is no different. The huge hulk of a man at the theatre who has a wet rag thrown at his face, a religious fashion show that becomes garish, and the various prostitutes at the brothel are just some of them. Interesting commentary on brothels and churches: "an invitation to sin, one that could be confessed to the next day."
So what is Rome, in the end? A city that has died and been resurrected so many times, that it's fitting to witness the coming end of civilization from there as Gore Vidal says? The vestal virgin and she-wolf, an aristocrat and tramp, a somber buffoon? The unflattering latter is given to actress Anna Magnani, whom Fellini calls the living symbol of Rome--(she died a year after this brief appearance). In the end, I'd say all these things and more.
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Acclaimed director Federico Fellini (Fellini's Satyricon, La Dolce Vita, 81/2) brilliantly demonstrates why he is regarded as "the last of the greatepic filmmakers," delivering "a thrilling personal memoir" (Newsweek) with this monumental and outlandish tribute to his beloved RomeThe Eternal City.This lavish autobiography, full of "lush fantasy sequences and monumental pageantry," (Los Angeles Times) begins with Fellini as a youngster living in the Italian countryside. In school he studies the eclectic but parochial history of ancient Rome and then is introduced as a young man to the real thingarriving in this strange new city on the outbreak of World War II. Here, through a series of "visually stunning" (Los Angeles Times) vignettes brimming with satire and spark, the filmmaker comes to grips with a "sprawling, boisterous, bursting-at-the-seams portrait of Rome" (Interview), reinterpreting with his inimitable style an Italian history full of "rich sensual imagery and extravagant perception" (Playboy).
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