This film contains everything.
As in, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
It is truly vast like the sky full of pebble stars.
There is no translation for Federico Fellini’s masterpiece Amarcord other than “I remember”.
Ah, good God: memory!
I immediately think of George Stevens’ paean to family I Remember Mama (1948) and, of course, the king of memory Marcel Proust.
But this is Italy, not France. And Remembrance of Things Past is a “bad” translation. More accurate is In Search of Lost Time.
And that is exactly what Fellini is doing here.
Trying to reclaim the past.
Remember this? Remember that?
It is, I am guessing, a conversation with himself.
A rumination.
It is a small town (or at least it feels that way).
And we have everything.
A blind accordionist straight out of Tom Waits’ dreams.
A femme fatale by the name of Gradisca (“take what you want”). [Played by Magali Noël.]
We miss the translation now and then. Perhaps the Romagnol dialect?
That explains our title Amarcord.
I remember.
“Jadis, si je me souviens bien…”
A season in hell.
From hell.
And yet a season of beauty as well.
Uncle Teo (Uncle Uncle) says it best…up a tree…over and over and over and over again:
Voglio una donna!
Voglio una donna!
[like John Lennon writhing in pain on “Mother” or “Cold Turkey”]
Voglio una donna!
“I want a woman!”
Each incantation different.
The 42-year-old Teo up a tree…on a day out in the country…on leave from the asylum.
And a dwarf nun makes it all better.
It’s not what you think.
When you look at the cover for the film, is says SEX SEX SEX.
Sure, there’s sex.
But it’s very matter-of-fact.
This isn’t a film with gratuitous nudity (only one brief nude scene).
Sex is woven into the film.
It’s alright to talk about sex. 1973. Italy.
Fellini is a big shot by now.
It is art. It is life. It is artistic expression.
Everyone is portrayed lovingly. Everyone is subjected to the same pimple-precise criticism.
Films don’t get any more real than this.
HOWEVER…
Fellini introduces an element of magical realism here and there. [The magic is due in no small part to Nino Rota’s shimmering soundtrack.]
Sure, it serves as a bit of a distancing technique (Brecht?)…a defense mechanism, perhaps.
This material is too raw; too personal.
It is TOO sad! One has to laugh because of how sad it is.
And that is the tragicomedy which lived on in the great Roberto Benigni’s comedies and the grand-slam of naïveté: Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso.
And so, to understand these latter-day…saints(?)…we must examine the old masters. We must get used to saying Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (the real title)…because cinema is barely a hundred years old, really. And so, we must look to Fellini as akin to Giotto.
Pros-pet-ti-va!
We get so many perspectives here…
It’s one of the few times AMPAS has gotten something right. This film. Oscar for Best Foreign Language. 1974. Look at the list. Lots of misses.
Back to Amarcord.
Beauty goes away. The big fish in the small pond.
But the blind accordion player endures.
Vulpina (Josiane Tanzilli) the nymphomaniac fleshes out the family portrait.
Ah ah ah…
It’s no use.
This film is all about detail.
There is no use recounting the endless assortment of fascinating characters who make this thing go.
You will just have to see it for yourself.
For all of its pithy naturalism, it is really a touching film.
Fellini gets every little detail right. Such a formidable picture!
-PD
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