Amarcord

Amarcord

If at any time there was a film constructed wholly from nostalgia and joy, by an unthinking filmmaker in the prime of his life, it’s Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord.” The word means “I remember” in the Rimini dialect Rimini being the seaside town of his childhood but these are memories of memories, reworked with love and imagination and much improved upon. Here he collects the myths of his youth, where all the people are bigger than life and smaller than life at once grand performers on their own stages.

At the center is a big, awkward teenager, son of a large, loud family, spinning with everything that’s going on around him girls he worships; tarts he lusts for; village rituals through the year; practical jokes he likes to play; meals that always end in hysteria; church’s thrilling opportunities for sin and redemption; Italy itself as vaudeville transient glories of grand hotels and ocean liners like movie palaces passing through town one night only; play-acting at Mussolini’s fascist costume party.

Out of this confusion sometimes comes an image of perfect beauty: In the middle of a rare snow fall, the count’s peacock gets loose, spreads its brilliant tail feathers in a blizzard. Such an image is so mysterious and unrepeatable that all you can do is ache with thanks for it all you know is you’re going to live forever now anyway so might as well make every woman in the world love you let alone drink every bottle of wine or even better make every film ever made before becoming yourself Fellini.

“Amarcord” is Fellini’s last great movie. His other masterpieces are “La Strada,” “Nights of Cabiria,” “La Dolce Vita,” “8 1/2” and “Juliet of the Spirits.” He made other important films including “Il Bidone,” “Fellini’s Roma,” “Fellini Satyricon,” “Casanova” and “The Clowns” but those six are him in his full power.

All of his movies are autobiographical in one way or another drawing from his life, his dreams, his earlier movies and a composite character starts to emerge from them, a hustler on the make with a rakish hat and devil may care grin who spins delight out of thin air while bewitched by visions of bodacious temptresses but shackled by Catholic guilt; a ringmaster who loves the swing-dance tempos of the ‘40s and ‘50s, liked to line up characters for processions and parades.

Fellini loved breasts more than Russ Meyer did, he was guilt-ridden like Ingmar Bergman, and he was also a showman in the manner of Busby Berkeley. He had danced so naturally to his inner rhythms that it never dawned on him that he was original in style; had he ever spent an organized thought on the kind of style known as Felliniesque or simply been following the air played when he worked?

It was usually a literal air. Like most Italians of his generation, he post-synched most of his dialogue, and so it didn’t matter very much how his actors read their lines; besides which, there would often be a small orchestra on hand or a phonograph playing music while a scene was being filmed. That’s why in a Fellini film the actors frequently don’t seem merely to be walking but somehow moving to an unheard melody. They appear able to hear the soundtrack.

“Amarcord” is like one long dance number, with interruptions for talk and public events and meals. It is made like a conducted tour through a year in the life of this town from one springtime until another comes round again. There are many narrators: an old rummy dummy who forgets his lines visibly before our eyes; a professor who gives us learned lectures about historical precedents within the town; singing voices by children heralding arrival of first dandelion balls of spring; and then there is Fellini himself as voice over confidant.

The movie takes place during what we might call the stage-opera phase of Italian fascism, which sees it as no more than delusion among fools yet father in family (a communist who plays Internationale from phonograph atop church tower to protest visit by fascist leader) is no less foolish either. Politics at this level are seen best between parish priest and communist mayor in The Little World of Don Camillo (Giovanni Guareschi’s bestseller of half-century ago): both sides are so Italian they prefer having fun with their public drama to winning or losing. Fascism was not fun in real life, but for that see De Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” since only characters grow in Fellini’s garden.

The town itself is a character. We meet buxom Gradisca (Magali Noel), who runs beauty parlor and flaunts her innocent carnality and her red fur hat before inflamed local males as though she had been elected to some public office; Titta (Bruno Zanin), who finds Gradisca out of his reach but offers to prove his manhood by lifting voluptuous tobacconist clean off her feet; “Ronald Colman,” who runs local cinema; Titta’s father (Armando Brancia), who attempts to rule family table with iron hand; Titta’s mother (Pupella Maggio), who threatens suicide more or less daily on account husband’s idiocy; brother, whose hair defies net and whose meal commands hypnotic concentration; local priest, obsessed with whether boys touch themselves; all of Titta’s playmates, gathering together for ecstatic mutual self-touchings.

Drama comes every day. Each summer the family releases Uncle Teo from the asylum for a picnic in the country, and this year he climbs a tree while they are not looking and refuses to come down, bellowing “I want a woman!” like a lovesick bull. He throws apples at anyone who tries to climb up after him, until finally the family sends for help from the asylum, and a midget nun arrives to order him down. This nun wears such an outsized wimple that we never see her face and immediately decide she is actually a man.

The arrival of a provincial fascist brings about an absurd public ceremony; all the fascists trot from the train station to the public square, where a papier-mache Mussolini looks like nothing so much as a comic bulldog. The local youth go through gymnastics exercises doubtless connected with national security. We get glimpses of their education, in hilarious montage of classes in the local school, one interrupted by the most novel and ingenious delivery of urine ever devised.

There’s also a poetic side to things when fog hangs over town and characters grope softly for bearings and when great liner Rex passes offshore and townsfolk row their boats out to watch it pass (it’s as artificial as the “waves” on which boats ride, suggesting how much national image depends on illusion).

Local imaginations are fired by what must go on at Grand Hotel where none of locals can afford to set foot although Gradisca is their heroine there and so is rummy-dummy when harem lets down rope ladders for him. Gradisca is carnal fantasy: hope personified: good-hearted friend. She also supplies an example of way Fellini’s films become his parallel autobiography; Gradisca is virtually same character, in appearance and behavior, as Carla (Sandra Milo), Marcello’s mistress in “8 1/2.”

Most beautiful scene in film involves snowfall and peacock feathers. Snow is plowed into impossibly tall walls to make maze through which boys and Gradisca have snowball fight. Saddest scene, at beach, is Gradisca’s wedding to slick fascist leader; marriage of their hopes and their doom. She pulls away from husband to throw bride’s bouquet, but there’s no one to catch it.

Fellini loves these people so much that his movie is saturated with it their hopes are such transparent things that they can see through them into each other’s lives. All the Fellini visual trademarks are here, including the half-finished scaffold that mediates between heaven and earth, and grotesque faces of extras, and parades and processions, and always Nino Rota music (and his arrangements of standards, especially “Stormy Weather”). Fellini shoots in color, making special use of reds and whites of Gradisca’s outfits. He stays mostly in mid or long shot correct distance for comedy using closeup mostly for intense longing.

The way this particular motion picture of his seems to come directly out of the camera is comparable to how anecdotes pour out from somebody who has told them countless times. If it has a somewhat melancholy tone, maybe it was because Fellini knew that things were not going well in the movie industry anymore and he would never receive as much money or have as much freedom again; this was his final film made solely on the basis of Fellini’s desire to create something.

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