| I'm a little worried that the blurb above is going to make it sound like there's no "plot" here and scare people away from what's probably my favorite Fellini. You want a good story? There are dozens of good stories here, driven by marvellously eccentric, earthy, sexy, sometimes scary but always very much alivecharacters. Sure, if you're looking at the trees rather than the forest, you'd call it episodic, but it holds together much more tightly than, say, Fellini's Roma. You've got your Aristotelian beginning, middle and end, you've got your unities of time and place. And what a time, but above all, what a place. This is a movie to get lost in, an Italy so lusty and loud and robust it'd tip over into the stereotypical if it weren't 100 percent Federico Fellini. There's the wonderful scene, for example, when the townspeople go out to watch a cruise ship pass. A blatant studio set, rolling sheets of black material for waves, a cardboard cut-out for the ship that nevertheless looks like an entire city passing through the night. This is a movie in love with sights like these, with the sound of virbrant voices calling across the town square, in love with pungent, persistent memory itself. |
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