Authors: Clive James
God knows he had enough to go on. In the early sixties Italy was still in the grip of a chest-beating male supremacy stretching back to the Borgias, among whom Lucrezia probably took up
poisoning just to get some attention at the dinner table. The first week I was in Rome, the papers were running editorials about a young Italian male whose Dutch girlfriend had told him she wanted
to break off their affair because her real boyfriend was about to arrive from Holland. The Italian boy stabbed her sixteen times with a carving knife. The editorials daringly suggested that this
sort of thing was giving Italy a bad image abroad. It was still a bold innovation to suggest that the crime of honour was unforgivable. From Sicily as far north as Naples, if a girl refused a
man’s hand in marriage he could still get her by raping her, because then no other man would want her. (Scandal arose only when
he
didn’t want her either, on account of her
being no longer a virgin.) As for men pestering young women in the streets, there was no north and south: Milan was as bad as Messina. Foreign women suffered most. They were assumed to be whores
just for being there. In Florence I used to get so angry at what I saw that it would spoil the visit. After the Florence flood in 1966 there was a startling change, which hit the other big cities
not long after. Suddenly the women’s magazines, which had previously been almost exclusively preoccupied with the mysteries of the trousseau, started carrying articles about how to divorce a
sadistic husband without getting killed. Women’s rights got a look in at last.
But anyone interpreting Italy then from the vantage point of now should realize that feminism was starting from a long way behind. Looking at Fellini’s wide screens full of big breasts and
accommodating thighs, it is easy to decide that he was part of the problem. The truth is that he was part of the solution. He was saying that men should be held responsible for what they did, not
for how they felt. It was an especially important message for a country in which what men did could beggar belief. Trying to change the way a man felt who had just stabbed his girlfriend sixteen
times, you might possibly persuade him to stab his next girlfriend only fifteen times. The trick was to call his outburst of passion by its proper name, murder. And to do that, you had to argue
that passion was every man’s property, and the management of it his responsibility.
Feminism was one of Fellini’s touchstones of liberty. The anger he aroused in feminists later on was because of his other touchstones, one of them being the liberty to express the full
squalor of the male mind. He did it with such bravura that it struck the censorious eye as a boast. It wasn’t, though: it was an abasement, and Anouk’s tight-lipped fury is there to
prove it. ‘
Vacca!
’ is the word she spits at the
culone
, Carla. It means ‘cow’ and in Italy it is a harsh word for one woman to use about another –
the last word, the fighting word. Luisa is insulted by the banality of her rival. For Guido to take a mistress might have been forgivable. But if this is what he dreams of, what sort of man has she
been living with?
If Fellini had not driven a wedge between how Guido thinks and how he acts, Guido would stand condemned, and Fellini along with him. But the wedge is there, in the beautiful form of Luisa. Guido
once dreamed of her, too, and he is still involved with her even though she has become real – the best evidence that she must have been the most powerful dream of all. Luisa is what the
German socialists used to call a
Lebensgefährtin,
a lifetime companion. Strong in her anguish, graceful even in despair, she is the true Felliniesque womanly icon. Anouk looked the
part. Masina’s misfortune was that she didn’t. When it came to the crunch, she didn’t have the right face to play herself.
In
La Strada
and
Nights of Cabiria.
Masina played the waif. She could be funny, resilient and even tough, but with a face like a doll she just couldn’t transmit
flint-like fury. You always wanted to pity her, and the point of Luisa is that she finds her husband pitiful, and hates him for it. Fellini followed
8½
with
Juliet of the
Spirits,
the all-colour extravaganza which is nowadays the most neglected of his major films. This time Giulietta Masina plays the wife. With the inexorable proviso that her face is borrowed
from a Cinderella who will never get to try on the shoe, the film is an opulent, radiant, unmanningly reverent tribute to her stature in Fellini’s life. This was the last film Fellini made
with Gherardi and Di Venanzo. They both excelled themselves. The sets are a cumulative marvel from an unsung opera and the photography makes colour film look as if it were being invented all over
again. Giulietta’s imagination and memory are explored like Guido’s in
8½.
In addition, there are layers of Jungian analysis, parapsychology, voodoo and drug-induced
hallucinations. Fellini subsequently told
Cahiers du Cinéma
that he didn’t need LSD to have visions, but there can be no doubt that he was willing to try anything in order to
give his votive offering to his wife the depth, weight and splendour he felt she deserved. The inescapable problem was that it was all within his gift. The idea was to show her liberating herself
from her psychological burden. But it was his idea, not hers. In
Fare un Film,
Fellini movingly looked forward to the day when women would give us their view of the world. There could be
no question of his generosity. But that day hadn’t yet come, and for the meantime he was stuck with his own stuff.
He still had plenty more, but first he had a crisis to get through.
Juliet of the Spirits
tanked in a big way, he broke with Gherardi, lost Di Venanzo, swapped Rizzoli
for Dino de Laurentiis, sailed straight into a real-life
8
½
situation with a film he couldn’t start, and wound up suffering from what seemed like terminal depression.
Most directors would have quit at that point and gone off to give lectures, but Fellini was on the verge of a string of films that are, at the very least, all interesting sidelights on
8
½
, and some of which, in one aspect or another, actually supersede it. Peter Bogdanovich once pointed out that Fellini’s first few movies, the ones we rarely see,
would have been enough to establish him as an important director. It should also be said, but rarely is, that the films after
Juliet of the Spirits
would have been sufficient to work the
same trick. A few weeks ago, on a plane between London and Bangkok, I watched videos of
Fellini Satyricon
and
Fellini’s Roma
. I still didn’t enjoy
Satyricon
very much: except for the scene where the patrician married couple commit suicide to get away from the moral squalor – a clear echo of Steiner’s unexpected yet inevitable exit from
La Dolce Vita
– it just doesn’t offer enough relief from its own all-consuming animality. The people in it behave like pigs, but not even pigs behave like pigs all the time;
sometimes they just lie there. (Fellini was too decent to be any good at decadence, and even if he had been, decadence dates: this is the reason some parts of
La Dolce Vita
now look
passé
.)
Roma
, however, came up fresh as paint. The traffic-jam scene is a far more effective comment on modern barbarism and insanity than anything in
Satyricon
,
which was supposed to reflect our own age but made it look good by comparison. In
Roma
, the threat of industrial society’s inhumanity is made real by the intensity of the humanity.
The
trattoria
on the street, with the tram clanging past, looks like the way of life we all want but suspect that only the Italians have ever had. It was probably never quite that folksy
in Rome: Fellini is remembering Rimini.
When I got back to London,
Amarcord
, the film that actually does remember Rimini, was showing on television as part of a memorial season. I had always recalled it as a delight, but now
it looks like a masterpiece. It hasn’t changed; perhaps I have.
Amarcord
(in the dialect of Rimini, the word means ‘I remember’) is like all the childhood flashbacks in
8
½
condensed into one. Saraghina is there again: a nameless tobacco vendor this time, but with breasts bigger than ever. Our young hero, appropriately called Titta, gets
his head caught between them, and this counts as a big adventure. Everything here is small-time: the cinema, the bar, the square. The cars of the ‘Mille Miglia’ automobile race howl
through town, but they are going somewhere else. The big, lit-up liner sails away. The citizens remain, eating, drinking, having families, and occasionally dressing up as Fascists. It takes a while
for the viewer to realize that this is a film about Fascism, and longer still to realize that this is
the
film about Fascism. Especially in the late sixties, Fellini was accused of having
said nothing about politics. He defended himself by saying that he saw politics purely in terms of personal liberty, and in
Fare un Film
he explains that the life led in
Amarcord
was the soil from which Fascism grew and can always grow: a life of arrested adolescence, narrow horizons, mean dreams, easy solutions and – saturating everything – ignorance. The film
bears out his analysis in every respect. He shows the disease with a clarity that defines the cure: Fascism is undisciplined nostalgia, a giving in to childish wishes, the cuddle continued, the
tantrum in perpetuity.
Fellini’s Casanova
is the film he should never have made. Artistically, it has some interest; strategically, it was a disaster. Some critics decided, on the strength of its
weakness, that he had been an erotomaniac all along. But
Casanova
is a dud precisely because Fellini was no pornographer. If he had been, his films would be running continuously on Eighth
Avenue and making a lot of money. Casanova the seducer is the wrong hero for a man who wanted to submit to his women, not dominate them; Fellini craved their individuality, not their similarity.
(So did Casanova, incidentally, but the statistics made it look otherwise.) Fellini had nothing but contempt for Casanova and wanted to prove it – a bad plan for an artist whose forte was his
range of sympathy. The film was such an unequivocal stiff that you wept for Donald Sutherland, who must have felt honoured to be in it and devastated when it didn’t work out. (Sutherland had
previously starred in Larry Tucker and Paul Mazursky’s
Alex in Wonderland
, a now forgotten but considerable homage to
8
½
, in which a young American director
has trouble starting a movie.)
Casanova is in Fellini’s next big film and last masterpiece,
La Città delle Donne (The City of Women,
1980) – only this time he is called Dottore Santo Katzone.
(Since
cazzo
is the Italian word for ‘cock’ and
-one
is the enlarging suffix, the name means that he has a big one.) Katzone, like Casanova, is really just another
version of Don Juan, and must suffer the same fate: to find his own endlessly repeated excitement an endless disappointment, to suffer the built-in letdown of the permanent hard-on. Katzone, though
not on-screen long, is probably the best stab at Don Juan’s pitiable doom since Mozart’s. Bergman, in
The Devil’s Eye,
gave his Don Juan too much finesse: his punishment
is to have the woman disappear at the moment he embraces her, whereat he gently recoils with a polite sigh. Katzone gets what he wants, and it eats him up. He can feel himself coarsening even as he
thickens, turning into one of the phallic sculptures that decorate his room, a petrified forest of dildos in which he is the only flexible component, and only just. Snaporaz, the film’s hero,
has no desire to be Katzone. Played by none other than Marcello Mastroianni in full panic mode, Snaporaz (the name seems to be one of Fellini’s many code names for a liar) is, like Guido in
8
½,
a married man battling his sexual imagination, but this time it’s in colour, and the women of his desires come on in choruses, in kick lines, in cabarets with Las
Vegas lighting effects: they slide down poles and go up in balloons. At the beginning, he gets off a train, and he spends the rest of the film trying to get back on. (It sounds like the same train
scene that was cut from the end of
8½
when Fellini realized that the circus finale was the only possible wrap-up.) He is trying to hide out in his own fantasies, but the militant
feminists are in there, too, and they want his guts for garters and his scrotum for a handbag.
Mastroianni’s brilliantly conveyed helplessness didn’t save the film’s reputation. An unflinching portrayal of a man at bay was widely condemned as a conscienceless parade of
unreconstructed male chauvinism. By this time, Fellini was routinely being called sentimental, even by critics who conceded the historical importance of his central films. Sentimentality was
supposed to be his weakness. His case wasn’t helped by
E la Nave Va
(
And the Ship Sails On,
1983). The ship-of-fools format is a certain loser unless the ship makes
landfall: we are given no tangible social life for comparison, so the artificial one on the ship has to refer to itself, with cramped results. But faces, as always with Fellini, stick in the
memory: Pina Bausch playing a blind woman, staring straight out of the screen with eyes like those of the dead sunfish on the beach at the end of
La Dolce Vita
, when Mastroianni sees the
girl who incarnates his lost innocence . . . Even at the end of Fellini’s career, there was something in each new movie to remind you of all the others – something to remind you that
there was a man behind the film, and that he had a woman beside him to whom he felt bound to explain himself. The explanation was always about the difficulty of marriage and the emptiness of the
alternatives. It was always about Fellini and Masina.
Ginger and Fred
was charming, but unworthy of them: the story of a couple of old hoofers who couldn’t really dance that well, it
gave Masina and Mastroianni all too many opportunities to be cute. But Fellini and Masina
could
dance that well: they were people of majesty, not puppets of fate. Pathos was
inappropriate.