Directed by Federico Fellini
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo, Rossella Falk, Barbara Steele, Guido Alberti, Madeleine Lebeau, Jean Rougeul, Caterina Boratto, Annibale Ninchi and Giuditta Rissone
Here's a truly obscure story for the blog. My introduction to Federico Fellini came not from some scholarly lecture on Siskel & Ebert, not from a film-making book...but on a little seen and long-forgotten USA network sitcom called Campus Cops. The show was about a pair of loser college rule enforcers and their Police Academy-style misadventures, and one of them involved inviting a bunch of hot chicks on campus for what they dubbed the "Fellini in a teeny weeny bikini" trivia contest. Highbrow stuff, I know. But it made me remember the name of this director, so I guess it worked.
I'm a huge fan of Italian cinema. At least Italian horror cinema. On my previous blog, I made something like 678 references to my love for a certain horror subgenre from Italy known as giallo thrillers, which were in essence gory slasher films with a heavy emphasis on mysterious, black-gloved killers. I found out the hard way that I am not a particularly big fan of Fellini. 8 1/2 got its title as it was Fellini's eighth (and a half) film. It is a sort of autobiographical fiction, which is a type of movie that I've rarely enjoyed. To me, it always comes off as very masturbatory. So get ready to read all about how I kind of hated what is considered to be one of the greatest movies of all time.
No matter what else I'm going to say about this film, I absolutely LOVED the first two scenes. The first depicts its main character seemingly choking to death in the middle of a traffic jam. The second shows the character flying a human kite. This character is Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), a famous film director who is going through a severe case of creative blockage on his new science fiction project. The opening scenes convey this perfectly in about 90 seconds, which is a level of efficiency that isn't matched in any way, shape or form for the remainder of the film's 2+-hour running time. Especially once this guy heads to a posh spa to be pampered and spoiled for the rest of the story while pontificating about life.
The first thing that any first-time viewer should know about 8 1/2 is that it has a pretty damn big cast of characters. How big? There are two characters with the first name of Mario. And much like how I gave up on Game of Thrones after about two episodes when I found myself asking if this was that one guy with long hair and a goatee or that other guy with long hair and a goatee, I found myself quickly becoing numbed by the interchangeable rotating set of instant names and faces. There are all of the people associated with Guido's film, from producers to writers to actors, all of whom growing increasingly frustrated with his unwillingness to share details of the movie.
And then there are the women of Guido's life. The central theme of the movie is the stable of women that Guido knows, and he knows a lot of them. There's Luisa (Anouk Aimee), his wife of 20 years, but there's also his mistress (Sandra Milo) and the constant presence of his fantasy ideal woman (Claudia Cardinale), who appears sporadically in scenes that exist only in Guido's mind. Or do they? This character has big-time issues with women, and it reaches its zenith in an extended fantasy sequence with Guido lording over a harem of women who banishes them upstairs once they reach a certain age and WHIPPING them back into shape once a mutiny starts. Now, I'm well aware that Guido isn't necessarily meant to be a sympathetic character, but...yeesh.
Much like the previous film The 400 Blows, this is a movie with a loose structure. But while that film felt like it still had a clear purpose and singular pursuit, this one felt, to me, like it was constantly going nowhere. The climax as it is consists of Guido attending the screen tests for his movie and seeing actors read for the real-life characters of his life, followed by a press conference and extended circus metaphor that rival anything I've seen on Twin Peaks in terms of sheer bizarre. Maybe this is just some exquisite European art that I'm too dumb to understand.
I can acknowledge the influence that this movie no doubt had on the history of cinema. It is one of the best-known movies about the actual experience of making a movie, paving the way for everything from Ed Wood to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The narrative, which constantly throws in flashbacks, fantasies and perspectives from a questionable story-teller, were no doubt major contributors to the styles of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. And the music, from existing classical pieces to its original score, is top notch. What is about Italian films and always having kickass scores? It must be glandular.
But man oh man, did I find this to be a tedious watch. It was tedious enough that I fell asleep once and had to rewind 20 minutes. Not because the movie was boring - as I've mentioned already, I try my best to avoid that word when describing films. It doesn't even have a slow pace; in fact, it moves along pretty fast, jerking you around for its extended distance. What 8 1/2 did not do, at least for this reporter, was engage me. Once again, I'll mention 400 Blows and how satisfying I found that film to be with its series of vignettes leading to a conclusion that served as a great release; this movie left me completely cold toward its characters, situation and story, especially as the final credits began to roll.
Rating time: * out of ****. Cleanse your palette with this, MY kind of Italian film:
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