A CHAIN OF GRATUITOUS EPISODES

8½ 🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱 5 Maryellens

“I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway,” says Guido, the tortured film director and subject of 8½, at one point in this thrilling, baffling movie. It’s one of many bold moves from director-writer Federico Fellini, to put his cards down on the table and turn his camera toward his hand. From the title card to the end credits, there’s very little separating Guido, brought to life by Fellini’s great leading man, Marcello Mastroianni, and the director offscreen. (The title states simply that this is Fellini’s eighth-and-a-half film; and when the credits roll, we learn that many of the actors in it—the director’s longtime production assistant, Mario Conocchia, his production director, Bruno Agostini, and his production supervisor, Cesarino Miceli Picardi—were playing versions of themselves.)

It may seem at first as if Guido/Federico does indeed have “nothing to say.” The film features a director recuperating at a glitzy spa from a minor health crisis who can’t decide what the movie he’s supposed to be making—the movie we’re watching—is about. Fellini himself wonders what he has to say: Five minutes in Guido meets with a critic, Daumier (Jean Rougeul), whom he’s asked to collaborate on the movie. Daumier, hates it—dismissing the script as “a chain of gratuitous episodes,” though he does allow they “may even be amusing in their ambivalent realism.”

There’s a lot hidden within Fellini’s ambivalent reason, though. At first it seems that 8½ is just about moving and looking. Cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo’s voracious camera never stops as it tries to keep up with Guido’s restless imagination. They wouldn’t have named it in the 1960s, but he definitely has ADHD: We follow his flitting gaze from colorful passerby to colorful passerby. We walk-and-talk with dozens of hangers-on at a time—actors who’d like some clue about the characters they’re playing, producers who need to finally nail down the budget and schedule, therapists who’d like him to get to his steam bath and mineral water. We fly from production meetings and cocktail parties into Guido’s distorted childhood memories, his wildest fantasies, his most perplexing nightmares. At some point during the visceral-visual tumult, we realize this movie has more to say than its 138 minutes can possibly contain. 8½ is a movie about nothing and everything.

It’s impossible to single out one sequence. Each encounter and daydream is perfectly rendered. What is more ghoulish than the film’s opening nightmare, when Guido nearly suffocates in his car, crammed bumper-to-bumper into the hold of a ferry? What’s more sexy-confusing than the childhood memory of going to watch the devil—Saraghina, the buxom town whore (the legendary Eddra Gale)—dance the rumba on the beach? What’s more hilarious-horrifying than his fantasy harem, imagining all the women he’s ever loved doting on him in his boyhood bath? And when his cast of thousands comes tumbling down the movie’s rocket ship scaffolding and into the circus ring for the film’s finale—what mix of sublime things does that make us feel? I cannot pick one, any more than I could choose between this film and my other Fellini favorite, its polar opposite, the neorealist masterpiece Nights of Cabiria.

If the movie leaves you cold, you’re in good company. Pauline Kael famously hated it, saying it was a “structural mess.” Indeed, there’s almost no plot to speak of in the usual sense. The film almost happily lends itself to self-parody—there’s a reason even people who’ve never seen a Fellini film call things Felliniesque. Deliciously arty and often opaque stretches alternate with silly business and earthy interactions. Encounters trigger memories trigger meanings; most of these connections we get, but I imagine some of them are sequestered away in Fellini’s imagination. As with Bergman or Tarkovsky’s more slippery films, you can feel at times here like something is too far over your head—or too far below the director’s belt.

The better critique, to my mind, is political, not formal. As with many films from the mid-20^th century, people wrestle with its inherent sexism: At its heart, it’s the familiar story of the Great Man and the wife who can’t understand him. Fair enough—but if the idea is tired, nothing about they way Fellini digs into it is. Notably, Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife and great muse, is nowhere to be found in this film, which seems to describe his own infidelities and her discontent in excruciating detail. Her absence only lends more depth to this metatheatrical exorcism. Guido’s Giulietta, the intense, gamine-like Luisa, is instead played with quiet intelligence by the French star Anouk Aimée. (And talk about art imitating life: Mastroianni is rumored to have had an affair with his co-star during the shoot.)

What can I tell you? Kael was sometimes wrong. 8½ is simply the best movie about making movies ever. Every frame is stunning, with Nino Rotta’s famous circus-y score lending the whole enterprise a jubilant, cock-eyed perspective. The cast is bello, bello, bello, from Aimée and Mastroianni, Europe’s Cary Grant; to the comedienne Sandra Milo, as Guido’s voluptuous, down-market mistress; to the hyper-stylish Rossella Falk, as Luisa and Guido’s sharp confidante, also named Rosella; to Claudia Cardinale, a real-life goddess playing Guido’s ideal woman.

Perhaps the most intriguing character is Daumier, the critic, who seems to exist in the film to rebut critics like Kael in real time. Fellini anticipates his detractors and weaves them right into the movie. Is this a cop out? Absolutely—but that’s kind of the whole point of 8½. We are traveling inside an artist’s mind, picking up and turning over every dream, doubt, and sin. Dissecting, in real time, the fears and hopes that make him tick. “I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever,” Guido tells Rosella toward the end of the film. “I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film to help bury forever all the dead things we carry around inside.”

Despite its outlandish artistry—possibly because of it—8½ succeeds on exactly these terms. It may be the most honest film you’ll ever see.