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Customer Reviews of Fellini's Roma

Fellini's Rome is Not Everyone's Rome
Federico Fellini's 1972 film is not his best, when he has 8 1/2, La Strada and La Dolce Vita to his credit. While many critics adore this film for its absurdity and plotless, dreamy structure, I found it boring and phantasmagorical. It is simply Fellini's version of Rome and not Rome, the Eternal City itself. To risk sounding negative, I shall admit that there are some moments in which it is most expressive of early 1970's Rome - the scenes in which the hippies and American tourists invade the city, the long scene in the outdoor restaurant where everyone is talking their heads off (though saying some pretty vulgar things) and my favorite scene- the underground archaelogical excavation in which the frescoes of old Roman Patricians fade into oblivion. But mostly this film is weak in that it bored me because there was no plot. It starts off alright, and the movie works well when there is no sudden fantasy sequences. Fellini is himself in this movie, as well as Gore Vidal. Fellini envisions himself as a young man studying Rome in his youth in a strict Catholic school (the slide/projector shows ancient monuments like the Colliseum, the Apian Way, Trevi Fountain and Vatican as well as an offensive pornographic image of a woman's behind) and later as a young man journeys to Rome itself and takes residence with a large family in a crowded apartment in a slum. Then the young man sees a talent show that is tasteless, vulgar and long-winded. I found myself just as unimpressed as outraged as the audicences that went as far as to throw a dead cat on stage! It bothered me that there is much attention to prostitution, brothels or cheap, slutty women. The cover on the film is the promiscuous woman at the start of the film. And for a film about Rome and Italy, there is hardly any allusion to opera or any true classical theater. The Pope fashion show was ludicrous and blasphemous. Only serious, hardcore fans of Fellini will want to own this DVD. It is a perfect follow-up to his equally absurd and sexually radical Satyricon, loosely based on the old Roman epic.

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Visual Feast from the Maestro
Originally made for TV, Roma is a classic in the later Fellini style. Interspersed with typically hilarious autobiographical remembrances of the city, the maestro captures the incongruity of modern Italian society's imposition upon the historic significance (both ancient and 20th century wartime) of Rome. Worth catching is the cameo of the iconoclastic young Gore Vidal near the conclusion of the film.

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Classic Fellini
From its Daliesque opening images of pollarded trees, caught in silhouette like the blasted stumps of an Ypres battlefield, Fellini plunges the viewer into a world which is both real and surreal, which is both a living city and an historical allusion ... if not illusion. <
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>Fellini often invokes themes of how we understand the narrative of our life - our memories, fantasies, dreams all become blended into some sort of logical whole. Here he explores Rome as a city of myths and illusions. The Fascists (who taught him as a child) presented ancient Rome as an ideal, as the eternal statement of civilised values. Yet the Rome they venerated was frozen in alabaster statues and decaying architecture. The Fascists' own illusion of permanence was to be rapidly swept away, yet they live on in the child's (now the man's) memories as a frozen statue of Mussolini. <
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>Education for Fellini was regimented by the Fascists and the Church. The Church, of course, also venerated Rome as the eternal city, the heart of the Church. Rome, it seems, had eclipsed Christ. <
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>And Rome dominates so much of popular culture - the cinema still celebrates gladiatorial epics. Fellini contrasts this with the popular culture of Roman vaudeville, a lengthy vignette playing on the bawdiness and vulgarity of the theatre going masses ... so different from the elegance of high culture theatre! <
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>"Roma" is delivered in a series of vignettes, images, flashbacks, sketches which capture both Fellini's own memories of the city and some of its 'classic' representations. It is, we see, a living city, but one which Church, State, tourists and academics are trying to ossify, to reduce to an institution which can be controlled and used to justify power, history, politics, culture, religion, life itself. <
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>For Fellini, Rome is a circus - and not the crumbling ruins of the amphitheatre. It is a living, ever changing circus of real life, of vivid imagination, of intellectual discovery and popular culture. It cannot be defined, it cannot be explained. It lives by day, it lives by night. <
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>We dive beneath the city streets to find engineers tunnelling, building a new subway system. Every so often they have to stop as they unearth more archaeology. Every time they stop, the archaeologists are called up to preserve, to save, to delay and postpone. Finally, the tunnelling breaks through into a room resplendent in beautiful Roman wall paintings. As the onlookers watch, the paintings crumble to dust. Sic transit gloria. <
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>And in the end ... the city is given over to youth. Late into the night, the city is taken over by young people on motorbikes. It's fun. It's a playground. It is a living international city, not the dead hand of history. The beauty that was Rome has decayed, as must we all. Fellini celebrates life, and so does "Roma".