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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