Reviews and notes

FESTIVALS:
1963 Acapulco, Cannes, San Sebastian, Moscow, Beirut
1997 Tokyo
2003 Bangkok
2006 Berlin, Rome
2007 Shanghai
2013 Torino
2021 Kolkata


Fellini’s 8½ is rereleased in cinemas: it is the director’s compellingly fluent and sustained meditation on films as dreams, memories and fears, and the way they offer a fascinating but illusory way of rewriting and reshaping one’s own life. The opening dream sequence is more sensationally disturbing than ever, still one of the most incredible things in cinema. And then we wake up to a reality that has the weightless quality of a dream. Guido, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is a celebrated film-maker, a version of Fellini, who has arrived at a midlife crisis and creative block (watching 8½ on the big screen is a way of seeing just how tired Mastroianni looks). After a stay at a ridiculous health spa, Guido retreats with elegant diffidence to a handsome hotel to take meetings with producers and interested parties: weird, almost hallucinatory exchanges that look more like the encounters from Last Year at Marienbad or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They must discuss his latest unnamed project – which appears to be an indulgent autobiographical reworking of his own life that includes versions of his wife, mistress, and various other women, but also needing a scene with a full-scale spaceship that has, staggeringly, been built on location. Everyone wants a piece of Guido, everyone makes demands, especially clamorous journalists. (“Are you for or against eroticism? Are you afraid of the atomic bomb? Do you believe in God?”) It exerts an irresistible pull.
- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 30 April 2015.



Always feeding directly on his experiences for material, Federico Fellini had an autobiographical binge with 8½. The 1963 movie - which marked eight and a half movies for Fellini (seven solos, three collaborations) - was the director's unabashed gaze into the mirror.

A vivid interspersing of fantasy and satire, it reflected ironically on Fellini's career - with Marcello Mastroianni as his alter ego. Its entrancing combination of technical virtuosity and modish psychology won Fellini his third Academy Award for best foreign language film.

Now, repeat-viewers and first timers can view the restored black-and-white classic, with 30 years of available hindsight. Its narcissistic themes - daringly indulgent then - now seem commonplace. The movie has been paid homage countless times, most notably in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories. Yet, you might just warm to that oldtime smoothness, fluidity and la dolce vita lifestyle.

In the story, film director Mastroianni has come to a spa to revive his creativity. His next project is due. His life is beset with collaborators, mistresses and other hangers on. His producer and his writer wait for a concept. Various actresses and starlets - including then-hot Claudia Cardinale - wait for their promised parts. And his wife, Anouk Aimee, realizes how far the married couple has drifted apart.

Stumbling through this miasma, Mastroianni begins to examine his life. He's incapable of making sensible choices where people are concerned. He is also continuously haunted by memories from his recent past and his childhood. Mastroianni is increasingly aware he has everything - and nothing - to say.

There are so many elements to savor. Mastroianni is an arthouse icon, as he continuously peers over sunglasses to relive memories, then pushes them back up to deal with oppressive reality. As his estranged wife, Aimee is another icon - unsuccessfully hiding her beauty behind bookish spectacles.

But Fellini's fluid choreography of music and image is the main appeal. In one beautiful scene the camera glides breathtakingly through a steam-room transom to catch a beak-nosed, naked cardinal as he lectures to Mastroianni. "There is no salvation outside the church," says the old man, absurdly imperious behind the modest shroud held up by his attendants. And in one of the movie's many childhood flashbacks, buxom beach resident "Saraghina" does impromptu, erotic rumbas for the young Mastroianni. If 8½ seems stuck in the early 1960s, it's only superficially so. Somehow, the movie is more than the dated crisis of a naval-contemplating artist. It's about the inability in all of us to make sense of our lives, put it all together and come up with something meaningful.
- Desson Howe, Washington Post, 26 February 1993.

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