Amarcord
Director: Federico
Fellini
Distributed by: Warner Bros./New World Pictures
Released: December
1973
Country: Italy
Going backward
chronologically with our Best Foreign Films, now is when we get into the
Italian and French dominance of the award.
No other country would win more than three times from the inception of the award to 1974,
while Italy won 11 and France 9 during that time period. The director of Amarcord, the 1974 Best Foreign Film, is known as one of the great
directors of all cinema, Federico Fellini, and this one is the last of his
three films that won the award.
I’ll start with this: You don’t have to know anything about movies
to know, after just a few minutes of watching this film, that Fellini is a
master director. The photography is
wonderful, with scenes in school, church, the town square, and the coast, that
are all marvelously shot. You can see
his influence over the art: The scenery
often reminded me of 1990’s winner Cinema
Paradiso, 2013 winner The Great
Beauty, and 1998’s Life is Beautiful. Francis Ford Coppola must have also been
influenced by Fellini, as one scene in the country brought a couple different The Godfather locations to my mind,
though that great film was made two years earlier than Amarcord. (The fact that Nino Rota, frequent Fellini collaborator,
did the score for both Amarcord and The Godfather probably had something to
do with it as well.)
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| Titta (right) with his father and grandfather |
I start with all that
stuff about the scenery in part because there isn’t much of a linear plot
here. This is more like a snapshot of
small town, pre-World War II north-central Italy. Mussolini is in power and fascism has its
clutches around Italy, but these small-town people have their lives to
lead. There is a vast cast of eccentric
characters, but the focus is mostly on teenage boy Titta, presumably based on
Fellini himself, and his family. Titta’s
dad is especially blustery and funny, looking remarkably like the guy who used
to wake up early to make the Dunkin Donuts.
He always seems to be angry, either at Titta, or at his freeloading
brother-in-law, or at his half-witted brother who won’t come down from a tree
he’s climbed.
There are scenes in the
classroom that reminded me of stuff you may have seen in the Little Rascals, only a bit more
PG-13. At one point, while a bookish-looking kid
is up at the chalkboard with the teacher struggling with a math problem, some mischievous boys
construct and extend a long paper tube, one boy peeing into it from his classroom
desk, sending a puddle next to the unsuspecting nerd. The tube disposed of before she notices, the
teacher looks down at the floor and then the student and yells, “What do you do?!” It's one of those immature pranks that you laugh at and wonder why you didn't think of it when you were young, and then think it's probably better that you didn't.
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| Looking for something? |
Fellini, or rather young
Titta and his friends, are obsessed with sex, and more specifically, with women’s butts and breasts. Close-ups of women’s rears appear frequently
in the film, with the boys and men gazing longingly. There is one amusing scene when a female
shop-worker encounters Titta and unleashes her breasts on him, nearly killing poor
Titta and no doubt requiring Fellini to use a wide-angle lens. (A look at the movie poster will give you a clue at what I mean--that cartoon really isn't a caricature.) In another scene, an aging but still attractive hairdresser
whom all the town boys have the hots for finds herself sitting next to Titta in
an otherwise empty movie theater. As he
moves his hand onto her slightly exposed thigh she snarkily asks, “Looking for
something?”
Armacord as a whole can be taken as a critique of an
Italy that allowed a fascist’s rise to power.
Some of the more serious scenes involve the struggle for these
townspeople to deal with the choice they had with fascism—go with it or get run
over by it. It strikes me, though, that
Fellini is presenting rural life much more lovingly and nostalgically than
that. Yes, the Catholic priests are tone
deaf to the needs of the people; yes, the boys spend all their time thinking of
girls; and yes, there are few weirdos who are part of the fabric of the place. But it seems like this was a
simpler time, and I think given how colorfully and brilliantly the movie is
shot, it would be difficult to not like this small Italian town.
The Title: A kind
of made-up Italian word meaning, “I remember.”
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| Time to make the donuts! |
The Culture: This was
a time between the great wars, in small town Italy, and Fellini presents us
with the naivety of the time. Everyone
knows each other in this odd cast of characters: the priests and teachers; the round-reared
hairdresser; the odd nymphomaniac who hangs around; and the strange town
character who talks to the camera from time to time. They all make up the time and place Fellini remembers.
Agenda danger: Fellini,
a non-practicing Catholic himself, seems to be critical of the Church, of
Catholic education, and of the way the Church viewed sex. But I found this presentation to be mostly an
accounting of how it was then, and not a condemnation of the time he grew up
in. Titta’s father, a comic figure
overall, stands up to the fascists admirably, as few must have in the time.
Best Picture that year: The Godfather, Part II
Rating: I must
say I was a little confused by this once I finished it: What was the story? What did it mean? But it was a film that was enjoyable to watch
from start to finish, and it stuck with me a little after I was done, which I
believe to be the mark of a great film.
