Cultural Cohesion (77 page)

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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
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
, 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
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 1960s, 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
, 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 Sante 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 let-down 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
, 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
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.