Orchestra Rehearsal (1978)

          For most of its running time, Orchestra Rehearsal is decidedly restrained, seeing as how it was made by Federico Fellini. Opening as a faux documentary, with the film camera standing in for the viewpoint of a crew making a TV special about the activities of a Roman orchestra, the picture progresses from light comedy to heated labor-themed satire and finally to a dose of Fellini’s signature overwrought symbolism. On one level, the movie is a simple study of group dynamics and a celebration of the intricate process by which orchestras create classical-music performances. It’s a valid endeavor made with intelligence and skill, but some of Fellini’s storytelling choices dull the picture’s impact.

          He spreads the focus around multiple members of the orchestra, with only the conductor receiving a measure of special attention because he’s ostensibly the villain driving the film’s slender excuse for a plot. Therefore, the movie doesn’t have a main character (beyond the collective entity of the orchestra), so the storytelling feels diffuse—each time Fellini lingers on remarks from this musician or that musician, the overall thrust of the piece falters. Even more problematically, at least in terms of generating conventional cinematic momentum, Fellini’s efforts to raise the stakes toward the end of the picture falter because viewers haven’t formed any special connections with the individuals who populate the story. Given its very short running time (the movie is only 70 minutes long), Fellini would have been better served presenting the piece as a slice of life without aspirations to dramatic impact.

          In any event, the action takes place inside the tomb beneath a 13th-century church. As an orchestra workshops several numbers for an upcoming concert, musicians bitch about their ostentatious conductor, debate which instrument is most important, and organize to defend the rights they previously gained through unionization. Some of this stuff is funny, as when two musicians fight about the personal space surrounding their chairs, and some of it is idiosyncratic, as when a male cellist derides the violin as an excessively feminine instrument. The movie sets up its premise fairly efficiently, then bounces from one random episode to the next until resolving into a melodrama once the conflict between the conductor and the musicians explodes. Fellini distributes screen time capriciously, lingering, for instance, on vignettes featuring an attractive female pianist. And once the final act arrives, Fellini succumbs to his customary appetite for cinematic excess, using flamboyant violence, grotesquerie, oversized props, and provocative sexual imagery to make points that could have been articulated more subtly. It’s hard to reconcile this overly stylized material with the talky stuff that came before.

Orchestra Rehearsal: FUNKY

The Clowns (1970)

          An oddity in Federico Fellini’s filmography, quasi-documentary The Clowns was made for Italian television but also released theatrically in Europe and the U.S. Part dramatization, part investigation, part memory play, and part phantasmagoria, the movie smothers its informational value with sonic and visual excess, and yet it’s not enough of a dreamlike experience to qualify as a full-on Fellini freakout. Like many of Fellini’s lesser efforts, it seems to reveal a director so preoccupied with his own mythology that he felt obligated to deliver voluptuous style whether or not voluptuous style was suitable to the project at hand. The movie isn’t so overbearing as to induce a screaming headache, but it’s close. And to say that The Clowns should contain fewer scenes of participants telling Fellini he’s wonderful would be an understatement. Anyway, the picture begins with a beautifully rendered scene that the filmmaker pulled from his past. As a little boy watches from his room late at night, a circus tent emerges seemingly from nowhere, since all the workers raising the tent are inside. The next day, the little boy wanders into the tent, encountering a magical world of animals, freaks, and, of course, clowns. Never one to leave well enough alone, Fellini quickly goes over the top at this point, presenting a parade of chalk-faced screamers who seem more monstrous than delightful. And, indeed, as the narration explains, Fellini was scared of clowns when he first saw them.

          Eventually, the film drifts into reportage about the history of clowns and the fading popularity of circuses in general. Fellini and his crew speak with ex-clowns, some of whom are still hams and some of whom seem like bitter men full of regret. The filmmakers also track down rare footage of early clowns in action. Overwhelming this valuable material is nonsense. In one staged vignette, Fellini encounters his La Dolce Vita leading lady, Anita Ekberg, while she tries to purchase a jungle cat as a pet. And throughout the picture, Fellini has a sexy blonde assistant stand in front of the camera to read narration like some sort of nonfiction-cinema siren. After being bludgeoned for 90 minutes with these sorts of distractions, as well as histrionic spectacle—including surrealistic performance sequences and a whole lot of World War II imagery—it’s tempting to ask why Fellini bothered exploring a topic that he clearly felt needed bells and whistles in order to sustain interest. Had the director gotten out of his own way and simply presented the world of clowns without adornment, The Clowns might have been less distinctive. Yet it might also have been more memorable and useful.

The Clowns: FUNKY

Fellini’s Roma (1972)

          At one point in Fellini’s Roma, a dreamlike pastiche of vignettes featuring famed Italian auteur Federico Fellini’s impressions of Rome, the director appears (as himself) to supervise the crew that’s making the movie and to chat with bystanders who worry that the director’s vision of their beloved city will be too extreme. In voiceover, Fellini provides the translation for a concerned Roman citizen: “He is afraid that in my film I might present [Rome] in a bad light. He is telling me that I should show only the better side of Rome—her historical profile, her monuments—not a bunch of homosexuals or my usual enormous whores.” The citizen’s angst is only somewhat justified. While Fellini does inevitably feed his appetite for images of grotesque prostitutes with two elaborate sequences depicting auctions at brothels (one high-class, one not), Fellini’s Roma runs the gamut from crude to sophisticated. As the director explains in the opening narration, the movie doesn’t feature a narrative, per se. Rather, it’s a series of sketches.

          Fellini’s Roma begins with snippets from the director’s childhood in the Italian countryside, where Rome was spoken about as a magical place far away. Later, the movie cuts to a re-creation of Fellini’s first visit to the city. Then, finally, the movie drifts into a succession of random scenes. Long stretches of Fellini’s Roma are filled with aimless montages of architecture, meals, and scenery (much of which is viewed from moving cars). Everything’s shown through the director’s unique prism, meaning that ethereal textures of light and smoke pass through scenes while actors occasionally wear exaggerated makeup and behave in stylized ways. Still, a travelogue is a travelogue, so the “neutral” scenes in the movie are only so interesting. Meanwhile, the extreme vignettes—during which Fellini indulges his predilection for cinematic opulence—often reflect style in search of substance. One of these strange scenes, for instance, depicts a fashion show presenting flamboyant new uniforms for cardinals, nuns, priests, and even the pope. As elaborate as this scene is, it feels expendable.

          Conversely, the handful of scenes that are executed with comparative restrain seem to work best. In one impressive sequence, Fellini re-creates the chaos at an average performance at a variety theater circa the early 1940s. Even though this bit features such vulgarities as teenagers masturbating in their seats and a mother encouraging her young child to urinate on the theater floor, Fellini beautifully describes the contours of a community’s ecosystem—the families, hecklers, louts, and performers sustain each other. In the film’s most magical sequence, an underground work crew burrowing a train tunnel discovers a centuries-old chamber filled with gorgeous painted frescos, only to watch the fresh air that enters the chamber age the frescos instantly. Moments like this one remind viewers how masterful a storyteller Fellini could be whenever he wasn’t trying to live up to his reputation as a provocateur.

Fellini’s Roma: FUNKY

Amarcord (1973)

          Revered Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini dialed down his flamboyant style for Amarcord, arguably the last unqualified artistic success of his career. A gentle dramedy somewhat in the vein of François Truffaut’s most nostalgic features, Amarcord (translation: “I remember”) provides a fanciful vision of Fellini’s adolescence in a small Italian town during the years immediately preceding World War II. Essentially a loose compendium of colorful episodes woven around the maturation of the lead character, Amarcord tackles a wide range of themes in lieu of a proper plot, so the film requires great patience on the part of the viewer. (In addition to the stop-and-start structure, the movie lumbers through an excessive 124-minute running time.)

          Within the picture’s vignettes are moments of humor, insight, juvenile ribaldry, political satire, and warmth. Viewers who are interested in Fellini’s biography and/or this fraught period of Italy’s history will, naturally, derive more from the experience than those merely craving entertainment. Speaking as someone with zero tolerance for the cartoonish style of Fellini’s later films, I can report that I was surprisingly engaged by many sequences, even though I found the movie as a whole underwhelming. Yet mine appears to be a minority opinion—during its original release, Amarcord earned such accolades as the last of Fellini’s several Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film.

          Major characters include Titta (Bruno Zanin), a teenager learning life lessons from eccentric neighbors and relatives; Aurelio (Armando Brancia), Titta’s hot-tempered father; Lallo (Nando Orfei), Titta’s lovelorn uncle; Gradisca (Magali Nöel), the town’s most glamorous woman; and Giudizio (Aristotle Caporale), the village idiot who periodically breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the audience. Some of the re-created memories in Amarcord convey a beautiful sense of community-wide romanticism, like the sequence in which town residents paddle boats into the ocean so they can view the passage of a newly christened Italian ocean liner. Other episodes are more whimsical, such as the sequence of Lallo climbing into a tree and screaming “I want a woman!” over and over, despite relatives’ attempts to talk him down. Predictably, many scenes reflect the director’s fetish for ample-sized women. In one such passage, a massively endowed store clerk nearly smothers Titta to death with her, well, tittas.

          Amarcord features so many recurring images and themes that it’s as dense as a novel, which means it’s probably a fascinating film to dissect. However, this also means that many elements get short shrift, notably the political commentary. Still, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno and composer Nino Rota help create unity, and the spirited performances lend vitality. Thus, even though the film’s simple pleasures occasionally get obscured by nonsense (such as a pointless musical number in a harem), Amarcord may be the most accessible and worthwhile of Fellini’s ’70s movies.

Amarcord: FUNKY

Fellini’s Casanova (1976)

          Among the iconic directors occupying the highest strata of the world-cinema pantheon, Italian madman Federico Fellini is almost certainly the one whose work I find the least interesting. And while one must divide Fellini’s work into at least two categories, cerebral art pieces and over-the-top freakouts, it’s fair to say that Fellini’s style is so extreme in all circumstances that for non-fans, watching Fellini films is like listening to a lunatic rant at top volume. The campy costuming, the grotesque characters, the voluptuous production design, the weird dream sequences—it’s all just too much, especially in the director’s later years, when he often slipped into self-parody.

          As a case in point, Fellini’s Casanova is an absurdly overlong adaptation of the legendary 18th-century lothario’s autobiography. Sprawling over 155 interminable minutes—that’s two and a half hours of noisy nonsense—Fellini’s Casanova contains attempts at many worthwhile things, such as questioning whether Casanova actually made emotional connections with his conquests and, on a deeper level, questioning what sort of existential malaise might drive a man to live by his libido. The movie also tries to capture the melancholy notion of an intelligent and sophisticated man who eventually became something of a circus animal, demonstrating his storied virility when the aristocracy of Europe expressed indifference to whatever else he might offer.

          Alas, co-writer/director Fellini surrounds these thoughtful elements with endless scenes of cartoonish stupidity. The filmmaker’s usual gimmicks are present and accounted for (extremely ugly supporting actors, women painted with whorish makeup), and he also includes such bizarre characters as a giant woman who wrestles men in a cage before taking sexy baths with her dwarf companions. (It wouldn’t be a Fellini movie without dwarves.) Even the sex scenes are not bereft of Fellini’s excessive stylization. The first carnal vignette, for instance, features Casanova holding onto the hips of a woman with whom he’s copulating and then bouncing around a room like some kind of erotic acrobat.

          Exacerbating the strangeness of the scene—and, for that matter, of the whole movie—is the manner in which Fellini presents his unlikely leading man, lanky and sardonic Canadian Donald Sutherland. The actor shaved the front of his scalp for this role, and then applied makeup prosthetics to his nose and chin before topping off the clownish effect with exaggerated eye shadow. He looks like a psychotic drag queen, especially when Fellini frames various point-of-view shots—from the perspective of Casanova’s sex partners—in which Sutherland pumps away at women with the aggression and snarling facial expressions of an athlete doing reps. (Rest assured, not a single frame of Fellini’s Casanova is sexy, despite the presence of lovely starlet Tina Aumont in the supporting cast.)

          Since Fellini’s Casanova employs a meandering, dreamlike story structure that wafts back and forth between time periods, the overall desired effect becomes hopelessly obscured. Is the movie supposed to be a criticism of Casanova’s libertine ways, hence the animalistic portrayal? Is the movie supposed to indict the audience for being fascinated by Casanova’s sex life? Or is the movie just another in a long series of intellectually masturbatory indulgences by a director who never seemed to recognize when enough was enough? Maybe you’re a Fellini fan who cares enough to find answers to these questions, but simply raising the questions represents as much effort as I’m willing to invest. As a last thought, however, I’m willing to acknowledge that Fellini’s Casanova is filled with eye candy for those who subscribe to the more-is-more aesthetic, notably during the impressive but bewildering opening scene of an nighttime outdoor carnival in Venice.

Fellini’s Casanova: FREAKY