The Maestro's Penultimate Fantasy

Federico Fellini famously opined that artists have about ten good years in them, that after that, things go down hill.  This proved prophetic about his own career (perhaps it was self-fulfilling), in that his masterpieces, all but one, anyway, appeared from 1954 (La Srada) to 1963 (8½). The exception is 1974’s Amarcord, the bittersweet “reminiscence” of his days growing up in Fascist Italy.

Though none but Amarcord match his earlier output, there are things to recommend all of his post-8½ movies, and any film by Fellini puts one by Rob Marshall or Michael Bay to shame. (Well, maybe not City of Women.) Take Intervista, for example, the director’s penultimate feature.  Filled with tenderness and humor, it is easy to forget that there’s not really a lot there.

Like all of Fellini’s films, it’s about himself, and this time he’s quite up front about it: it’s a fake documentary about Fellini making a movie,and preparing the long-planned, never-produced Amerika. As such, it is an at-times fascinating peek into the maestro’s methods, tempered by the fact that he was an inveterate, self-admitted liar.  Especially when the subject was himself.

It opens as the director is setting up a shot: huge arc-lights and Tonino Della Colli (director of photography) rise on a crane into the night sky.  Fellini is surrounded by old colleagues (Della Colli is one), and what strikes me at once is how old they all are.  The film-within-a-film — and Intervista itself, since all of Fellini’s cronies are also behind the camera — is being made by a gang of old men.  They look like extras from The Sopranos or a Martin Scorcese picture: old gangsters hanging around storefronts, gesticulating.  Fellini and his cronies are the mafiosi of Italian film.

As we follow Federico and his pals around Rome, we are reminded of all those circus scenes in the director’s films over the years.  Only this time, the circus is the production.  It is one of the maestro’s conceits in Intervista that he is a genial ring-master, and that his movies — at least in their making — are great big family carnivals.

The central character in the film is a young actor (Sergio Rubini) who auditions for the role of the reporter in the film Fellini is making.  Rubini is the latest, of  course, in a long string of Fellini alter-egos, the most famous being Marcello Mastroianni.  As Intervista progresses, the movie within a movie blends with the film Fellini has made.  It is not a particularly original notion, but Fellini pulls it off with a winsome twinkle, and not a little honestly-earned emotion.

In fact, as some observers have noted, there are four films here: (1) Intervista itself, (20 a documentary being shot by Japanese filmmakers, (3) filmed reminiscences of Fellini’s youth (played by Rubini), and (4) the fictitious movie they are supposedly making (an adaptation of Kafka’s Amerika).  Fellini juggles all these conceits with cheerful aplomb, rendering it impossible at times to tell which is which.

Two sequences stand out.  Sergio and the rest of the cast of the  film-with-a-film board a bus in Rome to travel to Cinecittà, the fabled Italian studio Fellini called home.  As they approach the studio, their characters become real, and suddenly we find ourselves within the production.  And as they travel along the way, they encounter Native Americans, Elephants, and a towering waterfall, which gets them all wet.  Though the studio is on the outskirts of Rome, for Fellini it represents something far more exotic, far more wonderful: it is a transporter, a transformer, that takes one away from the mundane.  It is only at the film’s end, as they shoot scenes among the ugly apartments adjacent to the studio back lot, that “reality” seeps into our consciousness.

The other standout is a sequence that starts with an encounter between Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, playing himself.  Mastroianni is costumed as a magician for a role he is shooting on an adjacent soundstage; Fellini persuades him to travel with him and his young star Rubini to party.   And as they travel, we have the spectacle of two Fellini doppelgängers, side-by-side in the backseat of a car, and in the front seat the maestro himself.  A discussion arises of vices arises between them, and upon being asked about women, Rubini-Fellini says “Frankly, what I like best is jerking off.”  Mastroianni-Fellini approves:

“Ah. Good solution. An exercise in concentration that stimulates fantasy, and I’d say it develops a novelist’s turn of mind. My experiences, for example, were like installment novels – always new characters who introduced other ones: ‘Meet my sister. This is my cousin.’”

As it turns out, the party is at Anita Ekburg’s house, and as it swirls around them, Mastroianni suddenly takes center stage.  Waving his hat and wand, he conjures up a “movie screen,” complete with a puff of smoke, and on it are projected scenes from La Dolce Vita between him and Ekburg.  As the camera cuts between the aging stars and their flickering shadows — dancing at the nightclub, splashing in Trevi fountain — we are treated to a moment of delicate nostalgia and emotion that evokes the cinema’s power and magic in a visceral way.

Intervista celebrates the movies with the maestro’s trademark blend of crassness and humanism, and although it is not the equal of 8½, his more famous movie about the movies, it has pleasures all its own.  In the end, the magic that has sustained the film, that his buoyed it up over its self-referential core, ends, as the last scene of the fictitious Amerika is shot in the rain and mud, with the God-awful apartment buildings that surround Cinecittà.  Although the symbolism of a return to dreary reality at a film’s end is obvious, it’s one that we movie-lovers experience over and over.

Intervista was the Maestro’s penultimate feature, and it’s hard not to be nostalgic and more than a little sad while watching it.  Although it is a stone cliché to say so, he was a true original.  And if he got repetitive in his later years, so be it: his repetition fascinated me, at least, until the end,