What is there left to say about Federico Fellini? Possibly not much, but folks keep on trying. Several months ago I vowed … simply vowed … to visit all of his first movies, up through 8½, and then write some (possibly redundant) but hopefully interesting stuff about them. I thought I’d churn ‘em out about once a week, producing a veritable perfect series of critical wonderfulness. So much for that . . . it’s been a month and a half since the last one. Anyway, this post’s on Fellini’s third (actually, his 2nd-and-a-half); you can find the first two here and here.

I Vitelloni opens as it ends, by visiting its central characters, one by one. The camera moves in a fluid tracking shot through the guests at the last party of the summer in a small seaside town, stopping briefly at each of our five heroes, the vitelloni of the title. They’re described in voice-over, and right up front, a sense of sadness and loss is established– although we’re not given the identity of the narrator, we know he is describing his friends, his colleagues, and that it’s all in the past. There’s Alberto (Alberto Sordi), big and handsome, child-like in his delight of self; Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste), aspiring playwright and self-styled intellectual; Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi), whom we soon suspect is the narrator; and Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini), singing on the bandstand. Finally, we meet Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), around whom much of the film will revolve; it is clear even this early in the film that he’s a womanizer. This remarkable opening shot has been referenced many times in many films, perhaps most famously via Steadicam in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. It is remarkably self-assured, economically establishing the nature of each character in one visual swoop.

There’s some confusion about the derivation of the title; Mick LaSalle, in a 2003 review for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote that the word vitelloni means “‘big veals’ or ‘overgrown calves,’” a reference to their continuing dependence upon their parents well after they’re grown. At the same time, co-screenwriter Ennio Flaiano believed it is derived from the word for “big intestine,” as in they’re just big intestines that their parents fill up, but who don’t do any of the filling themselves. The first opinion is the dominant one, but I like the quirkiness of the second, and hope that it is true.(1)

The opening party — which begins outside — is to announce the identity of the local beauty queen, Miss Mermaid (or Miss Siren, depending on the translation). She turns out to be Sandra (Leonora Ruffo), sister of Moraldo, and as a storm blows up, they move the party inside; there, a storm breaks of another kind. Sandra faints and the doctor comes and declares her to be pregnant. There’s no doubt who’s the father: it’s Fausto , and after some wrangling, he “does the right thing” and marries the girl.

At the center of I vitelloni is this fragile marriage between Sandra and Fausto, who can’t hold down a job, or remain faithful to his wife. But like other Fellini films — perhaps most prominently, Amarcord — their story is merely framework upon which to hang what really interests the director: the images and remembrances and episodes within his imagination.

In television, over a season, the trajectories of characters are often described as a “character arcs:” they begin at one place in their lives, then change incrementally with each episode, so that by season’s end, they are at a different place. In the case of the vitelloni, they begin as overgrown adolescents, living off their parents, unable to hold down jobs or have meaningful relations with the opposite sex. As the film progress, we expect them to move, to change. We know one of them is looking back on his tenure there, we suspect it’s Moraldo, but doesn’t anybody else evolve? Doesn’t anybody else change?

In a word, no. When Sandra gets sick of Fausto’s womanizing — some of which happens right in front of her eyes — she takes off with their baby, causing all the vitelloni to search frantically for her. When she is found, she returns to Fausto, who is not especially penitent. It seems clear that he’s going to keep up his slacker, womanizing ways.

This inertia is there in all the vitelloni, with the exception of Moraldo. Of all of them, he is the most restless, the most obviously dissatisfied with his life. As he wanders sleepless through the night-time streets, he runs into an adolescent rail-way worker on his way to his job. He strikes up a relationship with the boy, and it sharpens and provides focus for his desire to leave. The railroad is an obvious symbol of escape; in The White Sheik, it brings the country bumpkins — as it once brought Fellini? — to the big city. Here, it carries Moraldo away from his home and his family and his friends.

As the train carries him away, we once again visit each of the vitelloni, this time as they sleep in their homes. And through artful camera movement and clever editing, it appears that we’re on a train passing through each of their bedrooms, moving leaving each one irreparably behind. It is a lovely sequence, that intensifies the longing, the nostalgia, the leaving-behind of that moment. Perhaps that’s why the film resonates so intensely: we all have those moments of loss, we all grieve over what was. The wonderful last sequence — pure Fellini in its razzle-dazzle virtuosity — captures this feeling with heartbreaking poetry.

I vitelloni is Fellini’s first mature film, and it shows what a great director of actors he was: his compositions within the academy-ratio frame are precise, and he was a master at coordinating his players 3-dimensionally within that space. In one scene in which Fausto, Moraldo and his father (Jean Brochard) wrangle over Fausto’s misdeeds, the actors are arrayed in three different planes; the staging draws our attention to all three. (David Boardwell discusses this here, and points out that many modern directors seem to have lost the knack).

Fellini-fans know all the director’s tics — the circuses, the processions, the stairways, and etc. — but none are prominent in this early film, with the exception of the sea and the masked-ball scene, whichs hint at stylized night-club sequences to come. Buried as well are the sexual excesses, which only peek out around the edges: Fausto tries to play footsy with a comely woman in a theatre, while Sandra cuddles up to him on the other side. Alberto, in drag, kisses a picture of his dead father with lipsticked lips (holy Freud, Batman!).

But while some of his trademarks are lacking, what is present is a wonderful, classical score by Nino Rota that is not at all circusy, that captures beautifully the nostalgia and sadness just under the surface. And what’s more, I vitelloni is suffused with the humanism that is, for me, a hallmark of his work. Fellini not only understands these characters, but empathizes with them as well. Though he may find humor in them, it is never vicious, never below-the-belt.

In the last scene, as Moraldo says his goodbyes from the departing train window, it is Fellini’s dubbed voice we hear, and that sums up his empathy: in his imagination, he is Moraldo. Though he may not ever have been a vitellone, the film is nevertheless about Fellini himself.

1. There is similar uncertainty around the name of Fellini’s Amarcord. Fellini apparently made the word up–it’s close to Italian for “I remember”–but he denied that it had anything to do with. As Sam Rhodie writes in an essay accompanying the Criterion edition, “Fellini, a great liar, denied this origin, claiming instead that it is a mysterious, cabalistic word, linked to invention rather than memory.”(back)