Fellini's Roma ... Rome's Fellini

Arriving in Rome on a balmy day, there is no need to ask what's new. The answer is plastered throughout the city and suburbs on countless billboards, each displaying--against a deep-red Roman sky--the sad, skeptical face and extravagant bosom of a prostitute, one of the road-running night birds known locally as le polverose, or "the dusty ones." Given that familiar image, it hardly comes as a surprise to read the accompanying legend, Roma--Il Capolavoro Di Fellini. The masterpiece of Fellini.

Bold words. Yet several days following the film's premiere, public response and critical consensus testify persuasively that il maestro has, indeed, done it again. Praise is lavish for Federico Fellini's multicolored first-person diary of life in the city of the Caesars. "Beautiful, exhilarating, and a little mad," writes one delighted critic. Others find Roma "a phantasmagoria" ... "a film of furious riches" ... "poetry, exemplary ... cinema in its pure state."

The director himself appears to be taking success in stride, used to it, perhaps. "I wonder whether that poster will be good for America," he asks rhetorically. "Will they understand?" Pensive, his tie loosened, wearing a black sweater under a conservative gray-plaid suit, Fellini sits with chin sunk to his chest in a tiny office up two dingy flights over a shop on the Via Sistina, a refuge he seldom visits except between films. In front of him stand two enormous orange-leather chairs and, atop a handsome plate-glass-and-chromium coffee table that was a gift from director Franco Zeffirelli, a glass of straight Scotch.

Rehashing his rave reviews is the last thing Fellini wants to do. A solid hit in Italy, Roma would soon require subtitles and dubbing before its invitational showing at the Cannes film festival (where it was to meet with new success), followed by a U. S. premiere. Fellini declares himself wearied at facing the technical chores ahead. "The trouble is, it's so boring. Each time you dub is like doing the movie over again, and you have no more desire. It's an infant you have already given birth to once." About critics, he equivocates. Do they worry him? "No, but I admit a certain dependence on them. It they give me applause, it has an effect. If they don't like my work, I become a little more depressed. I need encouragement, as a child does. But critics are a strange breed. If they are married, as husbands they are still critics. As parents, they are critics. It is as though they exist on some higher plane, always compelled to see something not as it is but as it might have been otherwise. Like the Pope, who was speaking the other day about himself and 'the outside world.' As if he were no part of it! How can even a Pope exist apart from reality? There's a kind of madness, no? One becomes crazy with power and omnipotence."

Fellini smiles into his drink when an aide reminds him of the press conference in which an Italian journalist asked him to explain the significance of the blind characters in his films. "They search for significance, and they find it in blind extras. That's what I mean about critics. Though I didn't mean at the beginning to compare critics to the Pope."

Assured that many might be flattered, he changes the subject, changes the mood. In periods like this, with a substantial piece of work behind him, he is more relaxed than usual. It is Fellini's time for seeing friends, meeting with his tax man, going out to dinner, catching up on films he has missed, weighing new projects. Raising money. Ah, yes. A principal backer of Roma, he says, is presently in jail, following a financial scandal that delayed the production for months, though it was unrelated to the picture. Finding a producer to stand between him and the men who hold the purse strings is always a problem, yet his pictures are inexpensive by American standards. Roma cost something like $2,500,000. "In Hollywood, they spend $10,000,000, but most of that goes for telegrams. Also a lot for phone calls.

"What shall we do? I thought Playboy would ask me about women. This afternoon there will be only three ... two for me." By now, Fellini is on his feet, animated, picking up the phone to make reservations for dinner, asking an aide to call a female translator about her availability tomorrow. "If her husband answers, hang up," he adds lightly.

Aware that he has often been charged with mischievous behavior during interviews, Fellini evidently relishes the accusation. "Of course I invent answers. Isn't that only fair, since an interviewer invents the questions?" At the age of 52, with his long grayish hair crowned by a bald spot, the mask of boyish innocence still becomes him, and how well he knows it. He speaks English with a soft accent, sometimes haltingly, and believes he needs an interpreter--though when he has one, the interpreter can seldom slip a word into the uninhibited flow of conversation.

Rome with Fellini begins to assume a definite shape and color. Warm, easy, spontaneous, as rich in sensual imagery as the master's own unforgettable Roma, which affectionately distills the impressions of a lifetime.

• • •

The film opens in Rimini, a town on the Adriatic coast, with Fellini's boyhood dreams of faraway Rome as a synonym for worldliness and decadence....

A priest is delivering a slide lecture on Roman landmarks in a parochial school. A view of the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. The Arch of Constantine. St. Peter's. Then, suddenly, a naked woman's exposed bottom flashes upon the screen and the classroom bursts into cheers.

Later, a young man's fancy is captured by the great whore of Rimini, a lady in red who entices her queue of male customers into the back seat of a vintage touring car.

• • •

Rome is Fellini, Fellini is Rome. All the same, he gazes down upon the city's galaxy of lights from the rooftop lounge of the Hotel Eden, a block or so from the bustling Via Veneto, and he is not entirely sure. "Everywhere I go in Rome, I see a street corner, maybe a corner where we shot the film, and I think I missed something. The real Roma still escapes me. It is elusive, like a woman you have possessed and loved, then you meet her later and she has again become elusive, a stranger ... you wonder if you ever possessed her at all."

Distracted from the vista by the sound of a cocktail pianist in the next room, he makes a wry face. "You hear? The great danger of Roman restaurants is the music. Usually, they have these people with guitars and violins who surround you. The music gives you tristezza, you cannot concentrate. I like music only in my films."

Fellini orders a mai tai, which arrives in a huge clear goblet garnished with fresh-fruit slices and exotic sprigs of green, much to the amusement of two dinner companions--sporty Bernardino Zapponi, scenarist for both Satyricon and Roma, and Riccardo Aragno, Anglo-Italian journalist and an intimate of Fellini since the prewar years when they lived in the same pensione. A remark about the extravagant decor of his drink provides Fellini's cue to quip: "Maybe the bartender has seen my films. Do you suppose he makes it the same for everyone?"

Dinner proceeds through an Abruzzi cheese, an omelet, white wine and Fiuggi mineral water. Fellini refuses a cigarette with his coffee, having stopped smoking after an attack of pleurisy five years ago. "I gave it up, without heroism," says he, as the conversation weaves back to the postwar period of Occupation. Fellini recalls escapades with spies, roughnecks and Canadian MPs in a shop of his own, called Funny Face, where he drew caricatures of GIs on rest leave and sold them to the boys along with one-play discs carrying recorded messages to their loved ones at home. "The GIs had money and time to spend, and spent it on whores first. When they were satisfied, they came to me."

It is an evening of reminiscence and shoptalk. Fellini discusses Modern Times but prefers the pure Chaplin comedy of The Circus, made in the period before Chaplin's social conscience began to surface. "My one regret," he says, "is that I was born too late and started to make films after those early pioneering days of the mutes, when everything was in the way of being discovered." Aragno begs to point out that Fellini himself, almost singlehandedly, has revived a kind of lyricism and poetic imagery that restore much of cinema's original visual wonder.

"You think so?" Fellini smiles and arches an eyebrow, looking pleased but skeptical.

A lesser dispute arises about the time young Federico came rolling home at dawn in a horse-drawn carriage and had to peel off his shirt to pay the driver. He claims that Aragno watched the whole incident from a balcony and didn't help. "He's inventing again," scoffs Aragno. "He remembers things perfectly, in absolute, impeccable detail, even though they never happened."

"Well, that's my profession," Fellini replies with a shrug. Between the hotel entrance and the taxi stand, the director is accosted by an effusive fellow who pumps his hand and detains him in conversation for five minutes, though Fellini insists afterward he hasn't the faintest memory of meeting the man before. "Maybe he considers me one of the attractions in his tour of Rome."

• • •

"Roma," 1938. The young Fellini (played by 22-year-old Peter Gonzales, an American actor from Texas) tackles the city at the age of 18 to test his innocence against the harsh realities of Rome under fascism.

By 1942--1943, at the height of the wartime fascist era, he is frequenting whorehouses of markedly different quality--one a palazzo of pulchritude for rich men, one a cow barn for the poor.

He moves from gluttonous Roman feasts to a shoddy music hall, where drunks and hecklers in the audience (continued on page 232)Fellini's Roma(continued from page 158) perform a hilarious human comedy far superior to the bedraggled patriotic spectacle onstage ... the whole sequence a tour de force of urban folkways that ends abruptly with the whine of an airraid siren.

• • •

Choosing Gonzales, whose role is relatively minor, was hardly a matter of finding an alter ego equal to Marcello Mastroianni--Fellini's autobiographical self in such films as 8-1/2 and La Dolce Vita, and also a friend with whom he identifies closely. (Though they see each other seldom, Mastroianni still phones Federico in the middle of the night whenever his life gets complicated, which happens often.) "Gonzales just came in the last two days of interviews," says Fellini. "Sometimes it is better to come at the end, and he had what I wanted. A certain openness, not too little, not too much. I couldn't take someone terribly handsome, or everyone would say aha, look at Fellini...."

Generally an early riser, Fellini appears in the real workaday Rome for a morning coffee at the Grand Hotel's wood-paneled Rallye Bar. He is talking about young American directors. He likes Mike Nichols and especially Carnal Knowledge. "The original American slang has a very naïve, inoffensive sound. Here, they translated the dubbed version into pure Italian, the style of Dante, then added some of the coarsest words in the language. So it comes out very shocking, like an Oxford professor talking dirty." Not so surprisingly, Fellini gives highest marks to director Stanley Kubrick, whose 2001: A Space Odyssey struck him as his kind of trip.

• • •

"Roma" is a trip....

To the Spanish Steps, where spacedout hippies gather en masse. The Western world's new refugees--laden with pot and babies and backpacks.

To the fountain of the Pincio, where half-nude boys and girls make a quasireligious ritual of bathing.

• • •

Young audiences groove on Fellini, but the film maker in return expresses a degree of disenchantment with youth. "There is a generation gap. It's impossible to talk to them, to cross the bridge of noncommunication and penetrate that group identity. They are another kind of creature, compared with my generation in the time when I came to Rome. Sex is no longer a problem for them, yet they are not really liberated sexually, they are simply under the power of other, equally strong taboos. They mate like animals, or vermin, or worms--with all due respect for worms." A sequence in Roma spells out the problem, when a group of students challenges Fellini to explain why his film fails to deal with Rome's social conditions in a politically committed way. As if Fellini's personal and poetic vision were insufficient without that standardized label of "relevance."

Still, the director declares himself gratified by young people's appreciation of his work. "In New York and L. A., after Satyricon, they would approach me on the street and press a little package into my hand. A gift of grass. Then Satyricon was shown to a big audience that had come from a rock concert by a boy whose name I forget, quite famous. He used to masturbate onstage and was always being arrested. The youngsters there were smoking everything, anything. The response was tremendous."

In reply to a query about drugs--whether he, as an unordained high priest for the trip mentality, has ever been tempted to satisfy his own curiosity on the subject--Fellini places a finger to his lips. The shushing gesture is only partly a joke, for Rome's militant police have busted so many people that wags in London and Paris claim there is no Italian movie industry--because everyone has gone to jail. Fellini himself has recently volunteered to testify for a young French actor, Pierre Clementi, who has spent one year in prison and faces two more years for possessing a small amount of marijuana.

Nevertheless, Fellini is ready to describe his one-and-only experience with LSD. "Naturally," he begins, with characteristic slyness, "it brought me down a bit from my usual high norm." The experience came about some years ago, when a group of "medical researchers and chemists" asked him to volunteer for a controlled experiment. "I kept saying yes, certainly, but I was afraid. Then they caught me in the street one day and said we must do it now. So I called my wife and told her I would not be home. I didn't say I was taking a trip.

"Anyway, they led me to a room somewhere, filled with nurses, 14 or 15 people. Then they left me alone and went to prepare this elixir that resembled plain water. 'Here,' they said. I drank it. Nothing happened. They brought me a book of art, paintings, and asked me what did I see. 'Matisse,' I told them. 'Very nice; I like Matisse.' Pretty soon they played some music. 'What do you hear?' they asked. I told them, 'Bach. It's beautiful, Bach.' But soon after, I felt this strange, warm, burning sensation, a tingle from the back of my brain to the base of my spine. I began to walk. I walked for nine hours, they told me, talking the whole time.

"It was a mystical, religious experience. I feel an artist owes himself to try it, but perhaps only once." Fellini fumbles to recall the melting colors of sunset in a garden, a green sofa with its greenness abstracted from the object itself. "Words are useless here, merely symbols between you and this reality, where all barriers are melted. To describe it in words ... it's like describing fucking to some guy who has no prick."

• • •

"Roma" is a supertrip, surreal and awesome....

To the Raccordo Anulare, Rome's modern autostrada that encircles the heart of the old city with a band of poisonous exhaust. A vision of the "Inferno" on wheels.

To La Metropolitana, the Roman subway system as the setting for a nightmare fantasy: A group of journalists travels into the bowels of the Eternal City and sees 1000 years of history erased when subway construction workers come upon an ancient buried villa, polluting and destroying its treasures.

• • •

"Let's go to Ostia" is Fellini's brain storm for the day. "We can have lunch by the sea."

Driving a foursome to the beach in his dark-green Mercedes sedan, Fellini seldom touches the wheel, though he somehow manages to keep the car on the road without omitting a single Italian gesture. Art, religion, parapsychology and Roma are among the topics covered en route.

He discusses the Trastevere sequence of Roma, in which Mastroianni, comedian Alberto Sordi, Anna Magnani and Gore Vidal appear briefly as themselves. "They represent, for me, important facets of Roman society. Marcello has such typically Roman attitudes, Sordi is so cruel, Magnani so diffident. Vidal, of course, is a type of foreign intellectual who goes native, as you say. He is captured by Rome. Madama Roma has children all over the world."

Fellini acknowledges the heavily trafficked Raccordo Anulare with a mere nod and goes on to discuss ESP. He has a psychologist friend whom he often consults on questions related to his work. "The unknown is what interests me. I like to be involved in mystery. In private life, I have no identifiable set of attitudes. In my work, however, I have magic. I can be a child, a scientist, a saint, a sunset."

"You look more like a bloody cardinal," remarks his friend Aragno, commenting on Fellini's blue-velour jacket and crimson tie. "Federico really is a cardinal, of course. That explains why he's so preoccupied with ritual and all those wide, enormous bottoms."

The jibe makes Fellini laugh, but he shrugs it off and continues: "I believe the public, also the critics, like to be told what to think when they leave a theater, and usually they want to agree with it. If you show them the richness and ambiguity of life, they become frustrated. It is the same when they attend church. Traditionally, people like things to be codified, answers offered; so they are attracted to religion, which takes the place of a direct, fearful contact between you and the darkness.

"Still, the young protesters who believe in nothing are rather pathetic. For me, the ultimate protest is to resist pain and disillusion, fascism and boredom. How does one ever become bored? There is not enough time."

• • •

"Roma" runs riot in the eye-popping défilé, an ecclesiastical fashion show. Imagined by a zany old principessa and staged bravura style--seminarians in matched cassocks enter on roller skates, hand in hand; nuns prance and pivot as if their habits were part of a Paris collection, while cardinals and the Pope strut their stuff in a kaleidoscopic spectacle with high-camp, and possibly homosexual, overtones.

• • •

At the Piccola Pineta, or Little Pine, a seafood restaurant in Ostia, Fellini eases into a parking spot and casually fields a question about the clergy's reaction to Roma. "Odd as it sounds, the best response to the film has been from priests and Communists. The priests I understand. In the ecclesiastical défilé, they are mocked and glorified at the same time. So they miss the parody and see only the glorification. It is their blindness; their vanity." The thought seems to amuse him. Regarding the Communists, he remains baffled. "One writer for a Communist periodical has never liked any of my films, but now he writes an apology because of Roma. I always called him a shit, so what am I to do? He is probably still a shit who just happens to like Roma."

The headwaiter recognizes Fellini, calls him maestro and ceremoniously leads the way to a choice table with a view of the surf--though the dining room is virtually empty on this off-season afternoon. The maestro clearly relishes the performance. "An artist," he murmurs. "In Italy, there are 25,000,000 artists. We are a nation of artists, mostly people who want to save the world by making pictures. What we need are craftsmen--a few good, steady workers."

Halfway through lunch, someone directs his attention to a table on the sunlit terrazzo just outside. A stunning black girl, seated across from a slim blonde with a camera on her shoulder. The blonde waves and Fellini thinks he knows her. Moments later, he waggles a finger at the headwaiter and remarks aside that it might be nice if those young ladies were to join us for an espresso.

And so they do. The photographer, Mila, is on assignment for a Roman weekly and having a stroke of luck today. Across from Fellini she places her friend Samantha, an exotic Franco-American beauty wearing red slacks and a multicolored top to match her wildly multicolored eye make-up. Samantha's lashes are well over an inch long. On her jacket sleeve is sewn an emblem bearing the red-letter words Fuck You.

Though bemused, Fellini makes a game of being courtly. "Shouldn't that say fuck me?" he asks. "Or am I mistaken? Maybe it's my bad English." Intrigued by the name Samantha, he repeats it several times. He admires the way she paints her eyes, and is soon engrossed in palm reading. "This mound is sensuality," he says gently. "You have definite lines of sensuality in your hand." Samantha looks flattered, and with reason, for Fellini's wide-open admiration conveys nothing that a bright bird of passage could call presumptuous or suggestive.

After a stroll down the beach, with members of the group stopping here and there to discard shoes or pose for impromptu photos, Mila and Samantha bid goodbye. "The next time you hear I am working, come to see me," says Fellini. Samantha promises to do just that and the scene jells: This is Fellini casting.

Rome in the dusky golden light of late afternoon is a marvel from another rooftop bar at the Hotel Hassler, near the Spanish Steps and walking distance from Fellini's house on the Via Margutta. The restaurant will not be open for another hour, but they open it for Fellini, who enjoys the view--a wrap-around cityscape in shades of terra cotta.

Fellini is talking about a famous doctor in Bucharest who cured his rheumatism with anesthetic drugs long forbidden in Italy. He has also been treated by acupuncture, and segues into stories about a Roman homeopath with a considerable reputation as an acupuncturist. "Years ago, I had a colleague who was impotent. He tried psychoanalysis, physical therapy, everything. Then he went for acupuncture. The doctor placed these gold and metallic needles all round his head and neck and within three days he was able to achieve an erection."

Questioned as to the permanence of his friend's cure, Fellini pauses for a count of two. "The last time I saw him, he was doing fine. Of course, he can only make love with the needles in...."

• • •

The weird, brilliant climax of "Roma" is a cultural clash between a band of leather-clad motorcycle bums and the city itself. Headlights blazing, engines roaring, the cyclists rip through the night past the Castel Sant' Angelo, the Colosseum, the Imperial Forum, the Bernini Fountains--as if to pulverize the very stones of antiquity.

• • •

"It's true," says Fellini, "that there is a nightmare quality about the motociclisti at the end of my picture, yet this does not specifically imply criticism. While they are indifferent to the old city, the old, cynical city is equally indifferent to them."

That evening, Fellini goes to a screening of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. He admires the first half somewhat more than the second but notes a kind of aesthetic kinship with parts of Roma.

Now he has begun to sense the festering itch of a new project. Maybe a kind of ballad, or pop saga, to be filmed near Ostia. Maybe The Voyage of G. Mastorna, another frankly autobiographical epic he has wanted to do for years, in black and white. "This Mastorna is a film that grew out of a very unsettled time in my life. Also, I am thinking about some of the people I used to know in my home country, around Rimini. I want to go back there and think about it. Maybe I should confound everyone at last and make a film with no actors--and no director."

With half the young film makers in the world perennially grinding out movies that critics call Felliniesque, a Fellini film is a film by Fellini, who can do no other kind. "You try to forget what the public expects of you," he says, as if he welcomes the challenge, "and I feel I succeed in that. I never consider making a film against my nature, and there must be a constant effort to maintain one's integrity." In other words--even precisely in his words--the wonder man of world cinema is on his own trip, scanning the horizons with no arrivederci, Roma. "Usually, at this point, I have two or three films in my head and I am unsure of myself. I'll know I am ready to begin actually working on a new picture when I begin to hate it. I get full of this hate, thinking the public will really loathe this film, this will finish me. Then one day you launch your boat from the shore and you set out. It's always an adventure--not knowing what the destination will be."