TCM at 4am: Federico Fellinis ROMA (1972) is part sketchbook, part Freudian autobiography, and part titanic Italian ethnic joke. The intermittently dazzling Fellini can be accused of having vulgarized the whole of Italian historical experience as well as 30 years of his own participation in it. How else can one deal with the portrait of a nation reduced to a gross, filthy, egomaniacal tribe? And yet Fellinis creative interpretation of his planet from the focus of Rome can be inspired, as when he trains his sights on such worthy targets as future-shock highways and the pomp and circumstance of the Vatican. (If Fellini had never directed anything else but the movies elegant fantasy of an ecclesiastical fashion show, this one tour de force with runway and runaway religiosity would have marked him as a master of the medium.) Fellinis methodology of dressing up a lazy consciousness with the gaudy trappings of a lurking subconscious reaches its most poetic moments in the fascinating sub-theme in which Roman archeological discoveries are transformed into haunting specters for befuddled contemporaries (who are never going to get that subway built.) This spectacle - an entire film canvas emblazoned with a directors graffiti - is for viewers who love Fellini a la folie.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 01:01:56 +0000
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