Fellini: I Vitelloni

Federico Fellini left his hometown of Rimini, Italy, in 1937 and returned in 1945, when the bombs of World War II stopped falling. "It looked like a sea of rubble," he reports in Fellini on Fellini.* "There was nothing left." It had been leveled by American bombardment. "All right, all right, there was a war on but did they have to destroy every single thing?" After the initial shock, Fellini devoted a good part of his filmmaking efforts to re-envisioning his lost Remini. For his first adventure set there, he was able to transform Ostia, a town on Italy's western coast, while shooting I Vitelloni (1953) in black and white. The results are beautiful. "Ostia . . . is an invented Rimini, more Rimini than the real one. It suggests Rimini in a theatrical, scenic and at the same time innocent way . . . it is a filmic reconstruction of the town in my memory, into which I can penetrate -- how shall I put it? -- as a tourist without being [too] involved."

I Vitelloni ("the large young calves") tells the story of five thirtyish men hanging about their town with no particular plan. They live with their families and sometimes dream of escaping to Rome or, at one point, Brazil, but rarely does anything come of these ideas. The familiar has too strong a hold on them, and their families give them grounding. They hold on to a sort of freedom yet are fearful of complete freedom and also of complete responsibility. Time is not on their side, of course, and things change anyway.

I Vitelloni is an early "slacker" style movie, only with Italian panache. These guys often look dapper and cool, even when they're going nowhere. My favorite male characters are Fausto and Moraldo, the ones most clearly articulated. There are also stong female characters, as in all Fellini films. Franco Fabrizi plays Fausto's womanizer role comically (and he does crack me up), looking sometimes like an Italian Richard Burton and occasionally like Elvis. Franco Interlenghi's Moraldo is the most thoughtful of the group, a sort of stand-in for Fellini himself.

It's a gorgeous film, with seaside shots, street shots, trains, a carnival, dancing, a theatre -- an inkling of the Fellini imagery to come in subsequent films -- and numerous hot-blooded family interchanges. Ah, the Italians, a joy to watch and hear. The film influenced many other artists, especially Italian American directors. You can see the similarities in Mean Streets (1973) and The Sopranos (1999-2007), for instance.

*Fellini on Fellini, edited by Anna Keel and Christian Strich and translated into English by Isbael Quigley (Dell, 1976), pp. 31-33. The Criterion Collection DVD (2004) version of I Vitelloni is the one to see.

Viva Fellini!

Today's Rune: Warrior.

Ciao!