Federico Fellini (1973)

Amarcord is widely regarded as Fellini’s last masterpiece, an accolade that properly belongs, I think, to a film that preceded it by ten years.  The film is 8½, currently being showcased by BFI in their Fellini centenary season.  As a result, I’ve seen a trailer for it several times in the last three weeks or so.  The trailer has never failed to make me smile, which raised my hopes for Amarcord.  8½’s famous concluding sequence is a multivalent dance-parade.  Although it’s a piece of semi-autobiography, Amarcord strikes me as (like its immediate predecessors The Clowns and Roma) a parade – of extraordinary faces and physiques, and bizarre behaviour – almost from start to finish.  The prevailing robust humour – a regular supply of practical joke-playing, raspberry-blowing, high-volume farting – gets on my nerves.  The fault’s probably mine but it’s no good pretending:  I can’t get on with Amarcord.  I can’t even think of much to write about it.

The title, a compression of the Romagnol dialect words a m’arcôrd, means ‘I remember’.  The film, which Fellini wrote with Tonino Guerra, comprises a collection of memories – a year in the life of the director’s alter ego, the teenager Titta Biondi (Bruno Zanin).   He lives with his parents, Aurelio (Armando Brancia) and Miranda (Pupello Magio), in the coastal town of Rimini in Emilia-Romagna.  The episodic narrative climaxes in the death of Titta’s mother but most of the episodes are comical – or, at least, feature people doing ridiculous things.  This may be meant to connect with the larger folly of an Italy in thrall to Mussolini:  the time is the mid-1930s and a number of Fascist officials feature in the story.  The locals tend to be characters in two senses of the word – dramatis personae and irresistible (or that’s the idea) eccentrics.  They include, among many others, the pleasure-loving hairdresser Gradisca (Magali Noël), the figure-of-fun historian Giudizio (Aristide Caporale) and a prodigiously buxom tobacconist (Maria Antonietta Beluzzi).  Bruno Zanin was in his early twenties when the film was made and looks at least that.  Some of Titta’s supposed contemporaries look even older.  This occasionally creates what now seems a Blue Remembered Hills effect (though the film predated Dennis Potter’s television piece by several years).

As usual in the later stages of his career, Fellini shot little on location, preferring to construct the settings at Cinecittà.  I liked a sequence in fog, not least because it was quieter than most of the others.  The scenes leading up to Miranda’s demise are engaging although the appearance of a peacock isn’t the only harbinger of death:  Pupello Magio’s acting also signals that the end is nigh.  The most touching moment of all comes right at the end, after Miranda’s funeral and Gradisca’s wedding.  In the field where the community has been celebrating the marriage, someone asks, ‘Where’s Titta?’  Although he was on the screen just a few moments previously, the reply that comes is, ‘Titta left a while ago’:  Fellini is reflecting on how near and yet how far his past now is to him.   My lukewarm response to Amarcord doesn’t extend to Nino Rota’s music.  It’s an effortless, melodic blend of humour and nostalgia.

9 February 2020