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Fellini's RomaRating:
Release Date: 10 April, 2001 Retail Price: $14.95 OUR Price: $13.46 You SAVE: $1.49! Cast: Complete Cast (5 total) |
Fellini's Roma Reviews
Not one of Fellini's best but it still has its moments
In his later years, Fellini seemed to veer off into stream-of-consciousness flicks. 'Roma' feels like a conversation about Rome that moves from one topic to another with a vague thread holding it all together. Fellini's often cited for his visual induldgences and you get plenty here (not as severe as 'Satyricon' but not as poignant as 'La Dolce Vita' or 'Juliet of the Spirits' either). 'Roma' isn't really a bad experience. After viewing, I was left with a feeling of "What the hell....?" Two scenes not to miss are the discovery of an ancient city underground and the religious fashion show near the end.
2757 (Ab Urbe Condita)
Would "Caligula" or "Nero" be shocked at what their city, the Eternal City, the City to which all roads once led, has become so many years into the distant future? Or would they (probably more likely) find a way to fit right in somehow? This is one of the "notions" that I found myself pondering as I watched this movie. It really is a great movie, and it is certainly worth any true film fan's time. I may have even liked (some of it at least) better than (again, "some of") La Dolce Vita.
Having grown up in a very Italian family - with my father having been born in a "pagliarone" ( roughly, a slang dialect term meaning "stone hut") in an ancient and very rural village probably not much unlike the one Fellini's main character ventures out to Rome from - I myself was definitely "right at home" , so to speak, watching scenes like the famous "dinner on the piazza". (Personally I could watch that scene again and again and not get tired of it, but...maybe it is "an Italian thing", so to speak, and others would not find it so amusing). However there certainly is no dearth of general humor to be found in the antics of the wild cast of characters which Fellini always brings into his films. And Roma of course is no exception to this. For example, the bedridden obese old woman in a hairnet, who owns the building that he stays in in Rome when he first arrives there, who tells him, "now let's just live in peace and not bust each other's balls"! Or the bald old man who does a rather convincing Mussolini impersonation. My personal favorite though would probably be either the ultra-tanned would-be "Continental" kind of guy who approaches the female American tourist telling her, "You VERY bella" and offering to take her picture, OR the guy in the piazza scene (which is supposed to have taken place some thirty years prior to that) who was wearing one of those nylon "do-rags" that rap stars favor today, and yelling up to his dark, beautiful brooding girlfriend to get down to the piazza before he beats the hell out of her ... "again". Sure, these are walking stereotypes, these characters, and negative ones at that. But, as they say, there is a kernel of truth (at least) in all stereotypes is there not? For instance that "dinner on the piazza" scene that I mentioned before? It does perhaps resemble some sort of "prototypical" summer-night-in-Bensonhurst, or somewhere like that, with plenty of gold chains, "dago-t's", and "pane e vino" to go around.
On a more serious note however the most touching scene (and this is a point that is usually generally agreed upon, I think, by most of the movie's fans) is the scene of the sudden (and apparently accidental) destruction of the ancient Roman frescoes by the modern Roman work-crew. Obviously this is Fellini's artistic "condemnation" , if you will, of the massive industrialization of the City in modern times, and the (clearly potentially disastrous) effects of what we may call the "godless modern" encountering the ancient and sacred. Cruel and loud machinery encountering the long-buried, the "resting-in-peace", the, once again, "sacred". It is in a way akin to some of the imagery in the much newer film called Fahrenheit 9/11. There we see American tanks and fighter jets turning up the sand with shells and bombs, and setting fires and explosions, in the very "Cradle of Civilization", the land of the very first codified and written-out system of law and order. Such imagery, like Fellini's vision of the vanishing ancient frescoes, is so evocative it can truly make the viewer want to weep.
Athough Roma has improved much since Fellini filmed it back in 1972 ( I just left there myself a couple of months ago so I can say this is definitely so), in this film, during the time that he is showing it to us, the City appears to be delusional, vaguely delirious with fever perhaps, or in the throes of a restless night full of tossings-and-turnings and wild "half-waking" dreams. It is these dreams which are in fact the "images" and "vignettes" that Fellini shows to us throughout the film.
Overall, in comparison with the (mostly) worthless garbage that is cluttering the racks at your local neighborhood video rental store, this film (ANY of Fellini's films for that matter) would certainly be much more rewarding for the would-be connoisseur of truly good movies to pick up and take home tonight.
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