FELLINI SATYRICON
In almost every film Federico Fellini has ever made, the sea has occupied a very special place, sometimes as the ultimate barrier between confusion and understanding, sometimes as a kind of vast, implacable presence that dimly recalls protozoan origins. La Strada, La Dolce Vita, and his newest, most tumultuous movie, Fellini Satyricon, all end by the edge of the sea.
Watching Fellini Satyricon, which opened yesterday at the Little Carnegie Theater, you suddenly realize that Fellini, unlike the creatures of his extraordinary imagination, has refused to be stopped by the sea. He has pushed on, and there are moments when he seems to have fallen over the edge into the cinema of the ridiculous. You ask yourself: Is this dwarf, or this albino hermaphrodite, or is this latest amputation, really necessary? However, he finally arrives, if not at understanding, then at a magnificently realized movie of his own-and our-wildest dreams.
There have already been lots of pious alarms sounded over the excesses of it all, statements to the effect that it is fascinating to look at, but...and debates about its profundity—all of which strike me as about as relevant as finding oneself on Venus and complaining that one's Boy Scout pocket compass doesn't work. Even though I feel the film does have meanings, including dozens Fellini himself may be unware of, Fellini Satyricon is essentially its own justification, as is any work of art.
The film, which uses the director's name in the title to differentiate it from another Italian film based on the same source, is Fellini's adaptation of the satiric novel by Petronius Arbiter, written in the first century a.d. Satyricon has survived in such fragmentary form that all scholars do not necessarily agree whether it is a moral essay or simply a catalogue of the sexual achievements, most of them perverse, of its student-hero, Encolpius, his boy-lover, Giton, who has the constancy of a cloud, and his best friend.
Sometimes together, sometimes separately, Encolpius, Giton, and Ascyltus wander across the face of the Roman Empire, either participating in (often as victims) or just observing orgies, feasts, festivals, murders, abductions, you-name-it.
This is the first time that Fellini has based a feature film on a borrowed source, which may be the reason why the movie, although as fragmented in continuity as the literary work, achieves a classic dimension that is new for Fellini. Paradoxically, it is also his most original film. Fellini has done nothing less than create a new world, a kind of subterranean Oz, a world of magic and superstition, without values, without government, without faith, and almost totally without conscience. It has the quality of a drug-induced hallucination, being without past or future, existing only in a present that, at best, can be survived.
Fellini Satyricon also has the form of theater, of ritual, to such a degree that there is no difference between the reality of the film and the reality of a play-within-the-film or of the dryly comic legend of the Widow of Ephesus, which is pictured as it is being told by a storyteller at a sulphurous banquet.
This is made apparent from the very first frame, when Encolpius is discovered, back to camera, standing off to one side before a wall that is blank except for some odd graffiti. After a minute or two of rapid-fire, theatrically declaimed exposition, Encolpius turns to face the camera. From that moment on, Fellini fills in the blank wall. Quite literally, he turns his characters into art. The tale never ends. The film simply stops, in mid-sentence, as Encolpius, Giton, Ascyltus, and all of the other Fellini phantoms take their places in the fragments of a lovely wall painting that overlooks a serene sea.
The most spectacular aspect of the film, which is essentially descriptive rather than narrative, is the decor, the color, for everything has been manufactured by Fellini. Like El Greco, Fellini scorns natural sunlight. Even exterior landscapes have been photographed in such a way as to suggest the exotic fraud of the steamy, hermetic interiors. When Encolpius goes to retrieve his beloved Giton, who has been purchased by an actor, you aren't sure for a moment whether he has wandered into life, or into a play, although everyone seems to be speaking Latin and not Italian.
Even Fellini's casual way of synchronizing dialogue with lip movements works here. Dialogue comes to sound like incantation, instead of information. The individual elements of the film are realized with such conscious style that all of the nonacting, as well as the scenes of violence, or of copulations performed by persons fully clothed, have the effect of ritual, rather than the reality of some gaudy Italian spear-and-sandal epic, to which Fellini Satyricon is actually related, as all movies are related, though distantly.
The cast is a typical, multinational, Fellini mélange of amateurs and professionals, each one of whom exists principally as a face or just as a physical presence rather than as a performer. Most prominent are Martin Potter, an Englishman, and Hiram Keller, an American, who play Encolpius and Ascyltus and who might pass as a couple of Andy Warhol's tough-soft leading men. Max Born, a young Englishman who resembles Joan Collins in drag, is Giton, an existentical cupid as might be imagined by Genet.
Although all of the women in the film, with the exception of a patrician's wife (played by Lucia Bose), are harpies of terrifying scale, I don't think Fellini is pushing homosexuality, which he depicts with such noneroticism that the movie looks almost chaste.
Fellini Satyricon is no more about homosexuality, than it is about ancient Rome. It is a surreal epic that, I confidently believe, will outlive all its interpretations.
Vincent Canby, NY Times, March 12, 1970.
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