Roma

Fellini's films are a collection of unforgettable images, rather like reading through a photo magazine in a foreign language - you don't need to know the language to understand the pictures. The subtitles can be turned off and you can still follow one stunning vignette after another. Best of all, this film can be watched over and over because you will see something new or interpret it a different way each time.

Rome is seen as a carnival and the people are the freaks, carneys and revellers. Rome has been a great city for over 2,000 years and was once THE city - the center of the world. One cannot imagine New York in 1,800 years time, and certainly not Washington. The film shows the evolution of that great city into a noisy, overcrowded, modern-day nightmare of chaotic traffic, circling around the ancient ruins. Life goes on. We all turn to dust, but others come to take our place.

The most unforgettable image for me was the ecclesiastical fashion show as gaudy and vulgar as anything Ken Russell could dream up. My biggest problem was with the subtitles. Somehow I doubt that the viewers of Fellini's film choose to use vulgar American slang.

Roma explores the city of Rome from several different perspectives, giving it a mystical life of its own that hangs in the balance between its rich history and its modern identity. With no real chronology, Roma is a tapestry of bizarre scenes and familiar images that blend together into a gorgeous visual carnival. Typical of Fellini, with the carnival comes a critique--and Roma tears through the city's political and religious history, satirizing the Catholic church and various faces of Italian government from Renaissance times through Mussolini's reign and on into the 1960s. While the camera lavishes affectionately over Rome's art and architecture and is clearly a tribute to the Eternal City, most of the sets in the film are constructed, reinforcing Fellini's narrative imagination and keeping viewers caught in a perpetual contradiction between reality and fantasy, history and the present, fact and fiction.

A very personal, even autobiographical, always loving portrayal of the city wildly mixes documentary and fictional elements in a seemingly chaotic order, but thoroughly entertaining and amusing.

I have come to believe that Fellini is a genius (past tense would be irrelevant here). More so since as an American who studied film in Britain came to live my life an hour's drive from his birthplace when I was 49, 14 years ago. And discovered Italy. Fellini expressed Italy in the most accurate way imaginable. The so-called "Fellini crowd" does exist, everywhere here. Fellini lovingly satirized everything pitiful and shameful and laughable he saw around him.

I don't know whether I would call Roma a masterpiece, yet it is the work of genius. Fellini growing up under Fascism in Rimini, near the river (more of a stream really) Rubicone which Caesar crossed with his legion marching on Rome. Later, Fellini as a young man arrives in Rome at the outbreak of WWII. And Finally, Fellini in the early 1970ies introduces us to Rome. There is a plot! A very clear one. What's wrong with those who say the film consists of unconnected vignettes? But you have to live here for at least a decade or more to find the plot in Fellini's Roma.

Chaos is an Ancient Greek word, but it describes Italy to a "t". A chaos organized only in the imagination of arrogance of fascism and of the church, and of everyday ignorance.

"May I ask you a question" Fellini asks Anna Magnani attempting to interview her around midnight at her Roman doorstep. "No, I don't trust you, Federi, go to sleep" responds the famous actress. Should we trust him to tell us the truth about Rome, the Church, fascism and ignorance?

ROMA is not the kind of film you may want to watch if you are in the mood for a made for TV movie, but perfect if you want to get away from one. The ultimate cinematic escape, it is a collection of interesting and arresting scenes and images from Rome throughout history. It does not concentrate on history per say, but excerpts Italian society and it's lifestyles from the conformity of Mussolini's time to the hippy-dippy days - in a non-narrative, non-documentary way. Some things change, others stay the same. Don't expect to find much of a plot, but rather moments of great amusement with character and sometimes very involving images. ROMA doesn't insult it's viewers with it's unconventional liberties, and that alone makes it a worthwhile trip to take - even if only once.