Amarcord (1973)
'If ever there was a movie made entirely out of nostalgia and joy, by a filmmaker at the heedless height of his powers, that movie is Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord.” '
The title means “I remember” in the dialect of Rimini, the seaside town of his youth, but these are memories of memories, transformed by affection and fantasy and much improved in the telling. Here he gathers the legends of his youth, where all of the characters are at once larger and smaller than life -- flamboyant players on their own stages.
“Amarcord” is Fellini’s final great film. The other masterpieces are “La Strada,” “Nights of Cabiria,” “La Dolce Vita,” “8 1/2” and “Juliet of the Spirits.” He made other films of consequence, including “Il Bidone,” “Fellini's Roma,” “Fellini Satyricon,” “Casanova” and “The Clowns,” but those six titles show him in the full flood of his talent.
All of his films are autobiographical in one way of another -- feeding off of his life, his fantasies, his earlier films -- and from them a composite figure takes shape, of a hustler on the make, with a rakish hat and a victorious grin, spinning delight out of thin air, entranced by dreams of voluptuous temptresses, restrained by Catholic guilt -- a ringmaster in love with the swing dance tempos of the ‘40s and ‘50s, who liked to organize his characters into processions and parades.
At the center is an overgrown young adolescent, the son of a large, loud family, who is dizzied by the life churning all around him -- the girls he idealizes, the tarts he lusts for, the rituals of the village year, the practical jokes he likes to play, the meals that always end in drama, the church’s thrilling opportunities for sin and redemption, and the vaudeville of Italy itself -- the transient glories of grand hotels and great ocean liners, the play-acting of Mussolini’s fascist costume party.
“Amarcord” is like a long dance number, interrupted by dialogue, public events and meals. It is constructed like a guided tour through a year in the life of the town, from one spring to the next. There are several narrators, including an old rummy-dummy who visibly forgets his lines, and a professor who lectures us learnedly on the town’s historical precedents.
The town itself is a character. We meet the buxom Gradisca (Magali Noel), who runs a beauty parlor and parades her innocent carnality and her red fur hat past the inflamed local men ; and Titta (Bruno Zanin), who finds Gradisca beyond his reach but boldly offers to show the voluptuous proprietor of the tobacco shop that he is such a man he can lift her off her feet; and “Ronald Colman,” who runs the local cinema; and Titta’s father (Armando Brancia), who rules the family table with what is intended to be an iron hand; and Titta’s mother (Pupella Maggio), who offers to kill herself more or less daily because of her husband’s idiocy; and her brother, who vainly trains his hair beneath a net and focuses on his meals with a hypnotic concentration; and the local priest, obsessed with whether the boys touch themselves; and all of Titta’s playmates, who gather for enthusiastic mutual touchings of self.
Every day brings a drama. Every summer the family liberates Uncle Teo from the local asylum for a picnic in the country, and this year while they are distracted he climbs a tree and refuses to come down, moaning “I want a woman!” like a lovesick bull. He throws apples at those who try to climb up to him, and finally the family sends to the asylum for help, and a midget nun arrives to order Teo down. This nun wears a headdress so exaggerated we never see her face, and form an instant opinion that she is, in fact, a man.
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