Federico Fellini (1986)
Ginger and Fred’s clear main purpose was as a vehicle for pairing, for the only time, Fellini’s two best-known collaborators – Giulietta Masina, his wife and muse, and Marcello Mastroianni, the director’s alter ego in 8½ and perhaps elsewhere. The title characters were once a popular dance partnership, performing famous Astaire and Rogers routines, but Fellini doesn’t clarify whether on stage or screen or both, let alone suggest what the real Fred and Ginger may have meant to Pippo Botticella (Mastroianni) and Amelia Bonetti (Masina) – or to Fellini himself. Ginger and Fred is all about what this film’s two stars mean to the director, and to his audience.
Amelia and Pippo parted company – she left him, to be precise – in the mid-1950s. Thirty years later, she’s a mother and grandmother, running her own small business. He earns a pittance selling encyclopedias door to door. Their reunion takes place in Rome, where they’re invited to take part in the Christmas special of a popular, trashy television show – ‘Ed ecco a vuoi’. (The phrase translates variously, perhaps best in this case as ‘We are proud to present …’) Two in a cast of hundreds in the glitzy extravaganza, they’re to perform a medley of tunes from Astaire-Rogers musicals, giving viewers the chance to laugh at, or be sentimental about, the spectacle of two sixty-somethings still trying to hoof it.
Fellini isn’t ideally qualified to satirise this particular strain of exploitative TV pap. Ed ecco a vuoi is a freak show but plenty of those taking part are familiar types in the director’s own work – conspicuously big-breasted women, gender benders, a troupe of dwarfs, elderly men with the faces and hairdos of worn-out circus clowns. A couple of participants provide relatively topical digs at the all-embracing nature of TV celebrity culture: a business tycoon (Friedrich von Thun), who survived kidnapping by political extremists; and a notorious Mafioso (Francesco Casale), granted a day out of jail for the occasion. The clerics in the line-up – an ancient thaumaturge monk (Jacques Henri Lartique) and a priest (Luciano Lombardo) defrocked after abandoning celibacy – are a different matter. They serve as reminders that religion was part of tabloid news and fraudulent show business in Fellini’s world as far back as La dolce vita.
Fellini’s own form as a freak-show ringmaster is both a plus and a minus in Ginger and Fred. On the debit side, he devotes so much time to parading the bizarre contributors – in the outer reaches of the TV studios, the dressing rooms, and so on – that the eventual show, though amusing enough, is short on climactic impact, despite Franco Fabrizi’s lively cartoon of a dazzlingly insincere master of ceremonies. It might also seem a disadvantage that, when it comes to skewering such an entertainment and its cultural context, Fellini’s heart isn’t really in it. In fact, this turns out to be one of the film’s appealing qualities – an admission on its maker’s part, though it may be an inadvertent admission, that he’s naturally drawn to this kind of excess.
As Amelia and others appearing in the show head for their hotel in the taxi that picked them up at the railway station, they pass billboards displaying comically exaggerated images of nearly naked women. Fellini seems to set up details like this as if to register disapproval but is that why he keeps going back for more? In her hotel room, Amelia switches on the set and channel hops – a hackneyed device for illustrating the spiritual desert that television fare represents (this felt like a cliché in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, nearly twenty years before this film). Even here, though, Fellini finds commercial inanities to enjoy (and for us to enjoy). On the TV screen, a puppet of Dante solemnly intones the opening lines of The Divine Comedy before quickly brightening up: ‘the way forward had been lost – but with this new wristwatch …’
There’s another reason for Fellini’s dwelling on his company of grotesques: the story of Amelia and Pippo – as distinct from the past and present of Masina and Mastroianni – is rather thin. Amelia’s sense of entitlement and neat propriety are nicely contrasted with Pippo’s louche outspokenness but it’s a contrast created almost entirely by the actors rather than the script. Still, the underwriting does have benefits, too. A power cut blacks out the TV show just as the principals prepare to dance. In the darkness, they have an urgent, funny conversation, in which they resolve to make a last-minute escape (needless to say, the lights come back on before they can). As they talk, they also admit to accepting the TV company’s comeback offer chiefly in order to see each other again. That isn’t mentioned again once the show is over and the film is the better for that. Saying no more is recognition of what’s realistic in Amelia’s and Pippo’s lives after a thirty-year separation – besides, you can see their feelings in their faces as they say goodbye at the railway station. Ginger and Fred began with Amelia arriving by train and it closes with her departing on one. As the train pulls out, the camera briefly picks up the figure of Pippo in a crowded station café. The diminuendo ending feels right.
It also comes as a relief because things have been set up for something grimmer. The Ed ecco a vuoi cast also includes a clairvoyant/medium (Ginestra Spinola), whose son and assistant (Sergio Ciulli) is armed with tape-recordings of voices his mother picks up from the next world. These include a man called Pippo, which irrationally unnerves his namesake still in the land of the living. Pippo is worryingly breathless as he and Amelia rehearse their dance. During the actual performance, he tap-dances too enthusiastically, loses his balance and falls heavily. After struggling to his feet, he and Amelia complete the dance; the studio audience applauds with relief. Even so, the mishap is too shocking to be (as it seems to be) instantly forgotten by all concerned, Pippo included. Yet there’s an upside of this short-term memory loss: the film shifts sharply away from the sub-They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? territory it seemed headed for.
At a few minutes over two hours, Ginger and Fred takes too long to tell its skimpy story. (Fellini wrote the screenplay with two other long-time collaborators, Tonino Guerra and Tullio Pinelli.) The first half hour or so, before Pippo joins the party, is notably leisurely. These scenes may well be an expression of Fellini’s loving admiration of Masina – her continuing presence, for him, sufficient in itself – but there’s not much else to see in them. I’m not a fan of Masina’s celebrated performances in La strada and Nights of Cabiria but she can’t be accused of being Chaplinesque in Ginger and Fred and I liked her more here, without finding her portrait of Amelia greatly various or surprising. Masina does have a very strong moment after Pippo’s dance-floor tumble: as he and Amelia resume the routine, her trouper’s keep-going-keep-smiling determination is vividly intact.
The lengthy build-up to Marcello Mastroianni’s entrance certainly increases anticipation, though when it finally happens, I was worried. Amelia is already failing to sleep, thanks to fears that Pippo isn’t going to show up at all, and to the light from a TV transmission mast that moves unceasingly across her hotel room (it’s like a spotlight no longer interested in her). Then loud snoring starts in the neighbouring room and Amelia goes there to protest. She knocks on the door – it’s opened by Pippo, who looks and sounds theatrically dilapidated. This first appearance raises fears that Mastroianni will be expected to do a broadly outrageous-old-character. It’s a false alarm: for the most part, he’s wonderfully true to himself, and increasingly affecting. His voice, at whatever volume, is expressive – his eyes and hand movements are sources of pathos and humour (but he’s not Chaplinesque either!). Mastroianni may not have been a professional dancer. His natural physical grace creates the illusion of one.
The spiritualist lady in the TV show is a charlatan but Nicola Piovani’s score channels the musical ghost of Nino Rota (who had died in 1979) very effectively – giving substance to the nostalgic texture of Ginger and Fred, strengthening the piece as a remembrance of Fellinis past. When Pippo and Amelia come off stage after completing their dance, he badly needs to get his breath back. The floor manager unkindly hurries the couple out of the way – they’re instantly expendable. It’s another swipe at the ethos of mindless commercial television but, like most of the others, it doesn’t cut much ice. Fellini is just as keen as the TV man to move Amelia and Pippo on – to that sentimental but engaging rail station leave-taking. Ginger and Fred is an essentially self-indulgent film but that is part of its charm. It came late in the careers, and in the lives, of all three of Fellini, Mastroianni and Masina. They’d done enough by 1986 to earn a bit of self-indulgence.
18 April 2020
