September 25, 2012

Day 70/74 - 8 1/2 (1963)


Italian director Frederico Fellini was 43 when he filmed 8 ½ in 1963. I was only 20 when I saw it almost 48 years ago, and I'm delighted that the film has held up surprisingly well.

As trends have ebbed over the years, society has embraced enough of 1960s pop culture, that the film almost looks modern. Certainly many of the director’s issues—the role of the church our lives, the challenge of maintaining a marriage, the trap of success, the relationships between men and women, the challenge of artistic creation—all are still relevant today.

[Spoiler Alert] The film begins with Fellini’s alter ego, Guido Anselmi--also 43-- (played with wit and charm by Marcello Mastroianni) finds himself trapped in a traffic jam. We realize quickly we move in a world between realism and dream, when Guido’s car fills with smoke. After struggling to escape, the director rises from his car and above the traffic and flies away. When he is pulled down to earth by a rope tether, he is at a health spa trying to come to terms with a new film he is working on. 

Going to take the waters—with a classic line of old Fellini character types and religious figures played against Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries—Guido first sees Claudia Cardinale in white as a virginal figure offering him is cure. Guido takes a meeting with Daumier, his writer, who criticizes the script of his new film as a series of unrelated episodes of his own life, “utterly lacking in poetical imagination.”  Guido runs into an old friend Mario Mezzabotta (Mario Pisu) who is at the spa with his mistress, Gloria Morin (Barbara Steele), having left his wife of many years. In the following scene Guido meets his mistress Carla (Sandra Milo), a surprisingly coarse flirt dressed in a black velvet dress with mink hat. Carla has come to visit Guido, but he has put her up in a different hotel so that others won’t see her. They role-play in the bedroom, where he asks her to play a prostitute after painting her face with dark eyebrows. 

In the middle of the bedroom scene Guido’s mother suddenly appears and we find ourselves at his father’s tomb. His producer arrives and says, “It’s sad for a man to realize how miserably he’s failed.” The producer and cronies dress Guido as a priest. Guido and his father continue to talk as he climbs back into a grave. His mother kisses him and she becomes his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée).

Back at his hotel, Guido rides the elevator with a cardinal and three priests. In the lobby, he is surrounded by people who all want a piece of him. At the open air café that evening, old people dance and his friend and mistress dance. “This is a mad world,” observes the writer. A magician does a mind reading act. When he speaks with Guido, who he seems to know, we are suddenly at Guido’s family home with his grandmother and aunts. A cousin tells him to say the magic saying which will bring them treasure, “Asa nisi masa.”

Back at the spa hotel lobby, an actress who wears her eyebrows subtly like the whore, asks what her part will be. Guido escapes her and visits the production office where he imagines Claudia again in a white slip--his muse.

Carla has become ill from the water.

Guido meets with the cardinal and reveals he was educated in a Catholic school. The cardinal says that “Film has the responsibility to teach.” Guido fantasizes being back at school where he and five other boys run off to watch La Saraghina (Eddra Gale), a prostitute with heavy eyebrows who lives by the ocean. She rumbas for them for money. Guido dances with her. Two priests come, chase him and drag him back to school where he is publically reprimanded and teased. The priests condemn him, his mother cries in shame, and he is forced to wear a dunce cap. “Don’t you know Saraghina is the devil?” he is asked. He goes back to watch her again.
He asks the writer what it means and the writer says they are only “harmless little memories.” “You attempt to condemn but end up being part of them.”

As Guido moves to the mud baths, a discussion of Seutonius leads to another fantastic line reminiscent of the damned moving down into hell. He see a sophisticated lady whom he has noticed before whose makeup suggests a variation of the whore’s.

While the cardinal has a steam bath, he has a brief interview with Guido. “Why should you be happy? That is not why we are on earth… Outside the church, none will be saved…. That which is outside the City of God is the City of the Devil.” (And here Fellini cuts to the spa again.)

People in white and black suits wander around the outdoor café while “Blue Moon” is played.
Guido meets up with Luisa, her friend Rossella, Luisa’s sister and a friend. The producer, his entourage, Luisa and group, and Guido, all drive to a large outdoor rocket ship launch pad, a set for the new movie. 

“It’s pompous and stupid, just like the director,” says Luisa’s sister.

Guido reveals to Rossella that he is unsure about his relationship with Luisa and unsure of the film. “I thought I had everything figured out. I wanted to make a honest film, no lies, no compromises. I thought I had something so simple to say. A film that would be helpful to everybody… that would finally bury everything that’s dead within us. … Where did I go wrong?”

Luisa joins him in his hotel room and they fight. The next morning, as Guido, Luisa and Rossella sit alone in the open air café, Carla comes in her black dress and white fur hat. Luisa berates Guido for lying and he begins a long fantasy sequence where he first imagines Luisa and Carla dancing together in harmony. Next he sees himself with all of his women living in his childhood home together, with Luisa looking after all of them. An old showgirl with running makeup begs not to be sent upstairs where all the women go when they are too old. A new character, an African girl, also joins them. All the women finally revolt against him. 

Back in reality, everyone goes to view the screen tests for the new movie of the mistress and the wife, both obviously based on the real women. He imagines hanging the writer. Claudia, as Claudia the movie star, finally arrives and the two go off. “You dress like an old man,” she tells him. He feels that he has nothing new to say and imagines shooting himself. “Why piece together the tatters of your life,” he is asked.

They all go to a party at the launch pad. “Life is a holiday,” he tells Luisa, “let us live it together. Accept me as I am if you can.”

Suddenly all the people of his life are there, dressed in white. He is in black. Looking at them, he is suddenly willing to start the film he has been avoiding. A grand finale ensues where all the people of the film come down the wide staircase of the launch structure. In a symbolic ending, they all dance around the circus ring as it turns to night. Finally Fellini’s child alter ego in white ends the show, symbolically bringing all his issues to resolution.

One of the things my 20 year-old self missed was Fellini's fine sense of humor. Part of his reputation was built on quirky people and strange situations. The whole film is much less ponderous than I thought in 1963. Fellini’s eye for images is powerful. In many of his long shots or establishing shorts, he sets the horizon line below the center point of the picture which gives an immense sense of space. One might expect a film about one’s own life might be pretentious or “precious.” Fellini always looks with a self-deprecating and objective eye.

I totally enjoyed seeing the film again after all these years.

8 1/2 (1963) *****  (on Netflix streaming)


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