Movies: La Dolce far Niente

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opened with a statue of Christ soaring through the skies above Rome. That was three years ago, followed by a long quiet period during which the masses have patiently waited for the master’s next full-length film. Just released in Italy, Fellini’s new “8½” begins with . . . what have we here? Soaring in the skies above Rome is not Christ but Marcello Mastroianni, all 154 pounds of him up there flying on a string like a great dihedral kite.

A man on the lower end of the string reels Mastroianni back to earth, grabs him by the leg and shouts, “I got him! I got him!” Perhaps so. But nobody gets the point. For two hours, the picture’s first audience sat in polite, astounded silence while Marcello wandered about the screen in a subjective story that was, at best, out of reach.

Happy Ring. Mastroianni plays a middle-aged movie director planning a new picture but not quite sure what he wants to say. To get away from it all, he holes up at an expensive but sleazy thermal resort, where he relives his life in memory and in dreams full of Freudian images.

He sees in a pretty nurse (Claudia Cardinale) the symbol of purity and later recalls his childhood in a Catholic school, where he was seduced by a middle-aged crone. Mastroianni in Oedipal embrace with his mother is followed by Mastroianni in a harem being lovingly bathed in a vat by all the women in his life. Finally, Mastroianni has a vision that the film he wants to do is about the people he knows, not his fantasies. He dances in a happy ring with his actors and actresses.

Real Chaos. At the premiére, there was scattered applause but no shouting for the director. As the film spread out in new openings, reactions were marvelously at odds. People in one southern town nearly beat up the theater manager because they found “8½” so frustratingly incomprehensible. But so-called intellectual reviewers began chiseling out deathless lines of praise (“chief work of a magician of genius”) and tracing the influences on Fellini of Resnais and Bergman, Proust and Joyce.

“I’ve never read Ulysses,” groans Fellini. “I’ve never seen Last Year at Marienbad, I don’t know anything about Proust, and I have only seen one film by Bergman.” His director-hero, he explains, is just a man who finally accepts his own confusion and doubts and sees “that this chaos is the real force out of which his creativity comes.”

To help himself create this chaos. Fellini assembled an impressive cast that included some of his most devoted disciples—Mastroianni, Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo. Even when shooting began, none of the actors knew what the film was about. There was no script, and the seven existing copies of an “outline” were locked in a safe each night. Only the egomathematical title itself has a concise and plausible explication: it represents the number of films Fellini has made until now—eight full-length features and two quarter-length films, the latest of which was The Temptation of Doctor Antonio from Boccaccio ’70.

Fellini was annoyed at suggestions that the film was autobiographical. He and his hero Guido were, admittedly, both 43 and both directors. “But Guido.” he said, “is a failure as a director.”