Fellini’s film about a director who cannot make his film is as good as its reputation, and funnier than it. It is long, it is vain about its own vanity, and it is one of the few films we would send a stranger to.
Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is a film director who has come to a spa to rest and start his next picture, and he cannot do either. The producer, Pace (Guido Alberti), has built him a rocket launch tower the height of a church and wants to know what it is for. His mistress Carla (Sandra Milo) turns up at the station in furs and asks to be hidden in a second hotel. Federico Fellini, who had made La Dolce Vita three years earlier, has put a director’s block on screen and made it a comedy. We would send a stranger to see it.
Guido is stuck in a traffic jam inside a tunnel, the cars silent, every face turned to watch him as smoke fills his own. He climbs out through the roof and floats up over the sea. A man on the beach hauls him down by a rope tied to his ankle. Leo Catozzo cuts from the falling body to Guido’s hand reaching from a bed without a dissolve, and the film does this for 139 minutes: no marker between what happens, what Guido remembers and what he would prefer. We felt that fall in the stomach, and it is the silence that does it, not the spectacle: nobody in the jam will help.
Gianni Di Venanzo shoots the spa in white so hard the queue for mineral water looks bleached, and the nights in deep black with a single lamp. Piero Gherardi, who designed both the sets and the clothes, gives every woman a hat that could shade a market stall and gives Guido a black hat and dark glasses to hide behind. The rocket set, all scaffold and ladders against the sky, is the best joke: an enormous thing built for a film nobody has written. Nino Rota’s score is a fairground band that starts up whenever Guido would rather it did not.
Anouk Aimée arrives as Luisa, Guido’s wife, in a short crop and severe spectacles, and watches him lie with an exhaustion that is the most honest thing in the film. Sandra Milo plays Carla as a woman who reads comics, adores him and is never taken seriously by him or by the film, which is the point. Claudia Cardinale is the girl in white who appears with a glass of water whenever Guido needs an idea; he knows this is a childish thing to want. Rossella Falk, as Luisa’s friend Rossella, gets the sharpest lines. Eddra Gale is La Saraghina, the enormous woman who danced for the schoolboys on a beach in Guido’s memory. We laughed at the rumba, and then the priests arrived and we felt the boy’s shame as our own.
The film is about a man who uses women as furniture, and it knows this. It is also a film in which women are furniture, and the second thing is not entirely cancelled by the first. The harem daydream, in which every woman he has known waits on him in a farmhouse, is funny and also exactly the fantasy it claims to be examining. A character says as much to Guido’s face. We have decided that is both honesty and a good alibi.
It is long. The screenplay, by Fellini with Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli and Brunello Rondi, circles rather than develops, and around the hundred-minute mark we felt the circle once too often: another corridor, another audition, another woman on the stairs. The visit to the Cardinal and the screen tests could each lose two minutes. Nothing in the last reel is a story, and we will not describe it, except to say that Rota’s band is involved and that it moved us more than any tidy resolution would have.
Mastroianni holds it together by doing almost nothing. He listens, he ducks, he puts the glasses back on. Watch him in the hotel lobby being handed a script, an actress and a complaint; he never raises his voice. It is a 15, in Italian, and in black and white for a reason. See it in one sitting, on the largest screen you have, and do not expect to be told when you have left the dream.
