Roma

Around 200 B.C., something new appears in art:  Roman statuary busts become portraits -- the idealized features of Greek sculpture yields to a new obstinate ugliness.  Romans wanted to be portrayed as they actually looked, not as smooth-featured Olympian gods and goddesses but as human beings displaying the actual scars and blemishes of real life.  One the great innovations in Roman portraiture is the discovery of the paradoxical beauty of ugliness. 

Fellini's film about Rome, Roma (1972) luxuriates in this kind of idiosyncratic ugliness -- the people in his movies seem selected because of their memorable features.  An immense fat woman suffering an "inflamed ovary" lies in bed glaring at the young protagonist, stolid and immobile and enigmatic in her misery -- she looks like Messalina as imagined by Aubrey Beardsley. At a vaudeville show, a tubercular-looking woman with gaunt cheeks and a grey complexion is improbably matched with a hideous colossus, a great burly man who looks like he should be a professional wrestler. And, so, it goes -- one startling face after another leering at us from the screen.  At this time in his career, Fellini is said to have maintained scrapbooks full of pictures of extras with unusual and ugly features -- he claims to have constructed his movies around faces and figures whose grotesque or merely ugly features fascinated him.  Roma is crammed with memorably ugly people -- an oddity, because, of course, the Italians are generally an exceedingly handsome, elegant, and graceful people.  At one point in the film, an older gentleman sneers at Fellini:  "You will probably fill your film with homosexuals and your enormous whores!"  And Fellini doesn't disappoint in this respect.

In form, Roma is a random-seeming series of vignettes, many of them demonstrating Fellini's unique gift for apocalyptic imagery.  There is no plot and no structure.  The first 20 minutes of the picture is warm and nostalgic, a first-draft for Fellini's much more audience-friendly Amarcord, made the year after this film.  The director sketches his childhood in a provincial town -- there are some mildly bawdy elements, but this part of the movie is sympathetic and gentle.  (Of course, Fellini's Italians are always quarreling and he always inserts a rapacious wild-eyed nymphomaniac into the action, but, in contrast to what follows, this part of the film is understated.)  The young protagonist, Fellini as a teenager, ultimately travels to the big city and the next section of the film affectionately details the teeming household where the young man lived in Rome and ends with a sweetly generous (and extended) scene of Romans feasting al fresco in the shabby piazza -- everyone admonishes the skinny boy to eat and the girls eye him seductively and, although there are squabbles around the edges of the frame, the tone is similar to the poignant "remembrance of things past" featured in Amarcord.  The next part of the movie, however, is completely different and ushers us into another world.  Fellini and his film crew are approaching Rome on a freeway -- the sequence is astounding, a tour de force, and obviously intended as a kind of competitive hyper-charged response to Godard's Weekend.  The trip into Rome occurs at twilight in a downpour, sun shining in the distance but enormous puddle of red muddy water like blood flooding the freeway -- whores sit under umbrellas next to huge fires and there is a gory truck crash with bloody cattle strewn all over the road, hideous people glaring out of cars, trucks bearing all manner of strange artifacts into the eternal city, the Rome to which all roads apparently lead -- everything climaxing in an apocalyptic traffic jam at the Coloseum.  This is amazing piece of film making, similar to the scene in La Dolce Vita in which a rainstorm disrupts a crowd (and distresses a television crew) gathered at a place where a little girl has seen a vision of the Madonna.  After this frenetic introduction to the modern city, Fellini cuts back to the past -- he shows himself as a young man attending a vaudeville variety show, flirting with a German woman whose husband is fighting for Hitler in Russia, and, then, waiting out an air raid in a shelter underground.  The air raid continues into dawn and Fellini shows people running down the streets, shadows on obliquely lit walls as the sirens wail.  Other vignettes follow:  the camera-crew passes through a hellish subway tunnel under construction to a wall that is penetrated and opens into an intact Roman villa.  Gorgeous murals on the walls are immediately destroyed when the polluted air from the city leaks into the sealed rooms -- we see their features obliterated by a kind of accretion of filthy crystals.  There are two long matching scenes in brothels -- one showing a poor working class whorehouse and the other a kind of elite palace.  But in both places, the whores look alike and the men behave with identical fear and brutishness -- the point, made at ghastly length, being that a whorehouse is always the same regardless of its degree of sophistication and elegance:  the fundamental impulses are the same.  Modern Rome is filled with half-naked hippies whose sexual freedom fills Fellini with alternating envy and horror.  At the end of the film, there is a reprise of the great al fresco banquet scene commencing the movie -- all the characters are gathered again, but it is now 1972 and the city is teetering on the apocalypse.  Fellini sees Gore Vidal and a woman lets the American pontificate about the end of the world and riot cops beat the hippies.  Later, we meet Anna Magnani, still beautiful, walking home alone on a dark street -- she won't let the camera enter her apartment.  Fellini says:  "She is the embodiment of Rome -- vestal virgin and she-wolf."  The film's last sequence shows the deserted streets of Rome and the narrator mentions how beautiful it is to walk alone in the serenity of the great city just before dawn.  But, then, hundreds of motorcycles appear and take us on roaring, violent tour of the City's landmarks -- so ends the film. 

This movie has never been well-regarded by critics, but it is not inestimable.  In fact, from a purely visual standpoint, some sequences are among the best things Fellini ever did -- the freeway entry into Rome in the murky twilight rainstorm is simply astonishing.  And, even, the scenes that seem ridiculous on paper -- for instance, the long and elaborate "ecclesiastical fashion show" -- are effective in Fellini's visualization:  the "ecclesiastical fashion show" taking place in a cavernous ancient basilica morphs into a Baroque display that is so wonderfully excessive -- holy men seated on enormous thrones of glistening silver -- that it tells us something about the aesthetics of Rome that we would not otherwise be able to exactly comprehend.  The movies' logic is entirely visual -- the spectacle is the raison d'etre of the film and so it is not easy to define the picture's meaning or if it even has a meaning at all. (It is certainly an influential movie -- Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty seems directly derived from some parts of this film and its tone of beleaguered melancholy is very similar.)  I like this disorderly, incoherent picture and recommend it to anyone who admires Fellini.