Les vitelloni

Unjustly put into the back-seat of Federico Fellini's extraordinary career, I Vitelloni is a relatively simplistic tale of 30-something slackers in a small 1950's Italian town. While it doesn't stand out against works such as La Dolce Vita (1960) or 8 1/2 (1963), this shows a different side to Fellini's famous circus-tent approach, engaging Neo- Realist sensibilities to form a rather bleak, but nonetheless amusing autobiographical film. While Amarcord (1973) was a more straight-forward depiction of Fellini's childhood memories, I Vitelloni seems to be based on people he has observed, possibly while growing up, who, like him, sought to break out of small-town life. Amarcord was a sweet homage to his hometown, but I Vitelloni shows what this kind of life can do to a generation born to parents of sacrifice.

The Vitelloni (translated as 'the Boys') consist of Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi), a quiet, observant young man; Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), a handsome playboy; Alberto (Alberto Sordi), a daydreamer unhappy at his sister's affair with a married man; and Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste), the writer who harbours dreams of writing critically-adored plays. After Fausto gets Moraldo's sister Sandra (Leonora Ruffo) pregnant, he thinks about skipping town, but is talked out of it. He instead married Sandra, but continues to pursue women, whether they're single or taken, or even if they're married to his boss. With carnival approaching, we witness the group try their best to do as little as possible. They all dream of escaping the town, but do nothing to help it. Instead, they drink, gamble and chase women.

Fellini doesn't have disdain for these characters, but shows them for what they are. They see their parents and grandparents, old and seemingly miserable, and see what their sacrifice has brought them. So, naturally, they rebel. Fausto is undoubtedly a loathsome character, even going as far as leaving a cinema half-way through a movie, where he is with his wife, to chase a beautiful woman. But for all his flaws, he still manages to gather sympathy. It seems like he simply cannot stop, locked into a life in which he doesn't belong, but he is solely responsible for. Yet for all his complexities, you can't help but feel relieved when he is given his comeuppance by his father. It's a clever juxtaposition of the generations, and although society will always produce a 'generation X', sometimes a good slap in the face is what is needed.

Although Fellini remains somewhat reserved throughout the majority of the film, choosing a still, controlled camera, he breaks out of the neo- Realism approach about half-way through for a scene in which carnival comes to town, with the sound of a lonesome drunken trumpet player running in a circle bellowing in an abandoned dance hall, as the catatonic Alberto staggers outside. It's the style that he would explode with in later years, as giant paper-mache heads poke out amongst sweaty party-goers. It helps counteract the seriousness of the movie's themes, perhaps even subtly elevating it, but it's the film's touching final sentiment that will stay with you, as a train carries one of the Vitelloni out of the town. Whether he will be back, or whether it will finally allow him to be happy we don't know, and that's a tragic statement if there ever was one.

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An early Fellini and a wonderful one at that. While it is not my favourite Fellini(my top 5 being Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Amarcord and La Strada), it is one of his best and sadly one of his more neglected works. The film does look gorgeous, with rapid yet fluid cinematography and beautiful scenery. Nino Rota's score brings great pathos to every scene it appears in, the script is funny, tense and moving and while familiar in a way the story is engaging. The character studies are just as impressive, these are distinct characters that you do care for. You don't perhaps quite identify with them in the way you do with the titular characters of La Strada and especially Nights of Cabiria, but they are not as detached as some of Fellini's later films like Casanova or Satyricon(my least favourite Fellini but still has its interest points). Fellini's direction is restrained yet quirky and charming, the complete opposite of self-indulgent or dull like him and some of his later films have been criticised for being. The acting is very good indeed, Franco Fabrizi as Fausto especially is superb. All in all, a wonderful film and one of Fellini's better films while not quite among my absolute favourites from him. 9/10 Bethany Cox

I Vitelloni was Federico Fellini's third film, and it shows very well how he was maturing in his style, and likewise very well how he was not yet fully mature. His next film would be La Strada, one of the world's great films. I Vitelloni, although many who have had the chance to see it champion it as one of his best, is a tier down from La Strada and his other melodramatic masterpiece, Nights of Cabiria (his other masterpieces, IMO, are La Dolce Vita, 8 ½, and Amarcord of those I've seen, which are all of the ones that are generally considered to be great; I'd also make a case for And the Ship Sails On). The film's flaws are mostly in the script: it is sloppy. There are several great scenes, a couple of the best, especially in a visual aspect, that Fellini ever created, but more often the actions of the characters are difficult to understand. The characters themselves aren't all that well defined - in a scene that has since become common, the five title characters are introduced to us by a narrator, who tells us certain primary traits for each of them. Sadly, we only learn a bit more about most of them. What really harms the film, though, is the fact that a few of these main characters are difficult to distinguish from one another. To make things worse, as time moves on in the film, the characters constantly change the style of their facial hair!

The film is quite episodic, which is actually Fellini's most common way of going about it, but most of the events in his better films seem to bear more weight on the emotions of the films. I Vitelloni is still a very good film, but, given its unavailability, it's unnecessary to knock yourself down searching it out. Perhaps Criterion will release it on DVD soon. Maybe, if it has some good extras, I'll purchase it. 8/10.

I generally don't have a lot of patience for male angst, and especially not when the males in question are angsting over the days of their youth and are resisting taking on the responsibilities that come with adulthood. I wanted to see a truck slam into Barry Levinson's Diner and put an end to the endless pontificating of his disaffected bros.

But something about Federico Fellini's "I Vitelloni" makes the exercise tolerable, and not just tolerable, but emotionally engaging. Maybe it helps that he films his story in a detached, Italian neo-realist style, so we just observe; we're not necessarily asked to condone or even sympathize. It also helps that the setting is post-WWII Europe, and a humble rural village in post-WWII Europe at that. These aren't guys brought up in a world of privilege whining about how hard they have it. These are guys trying to figure out what kinds of lives are available to them in a place that offers few options.

"I Vitelloni" is clearly a very personal film for Fellini, and it's not hard to figure out which character most represents him.

Grade: A

Federico Fellini's second feature, *I Vitelloni* (literal trans.: "fatted veal calves"; figurative trans.: "the guys"), is an honest, unpretentious work from the Master before he became besotted with his own self-indulgence.

It's autobiographical in several indirect ways. The depictions here of young men who are not quite so young anymore, living with their mothers, settling for dead-end jobs or simply not working, and generally languishing their lives away, are based on Fellini's own observations of such fellows in his boyhood home of Rimini. Autobiographical too in its sense of style: the movie is inescapably stamped by the Neo-Realism of Fellini's apprenticeship. The grimy faces of working-class people, crumbling tenements, and weed-choked rail-yards are all here. But with a difference: Fellini casts a critical eye on this scene, eschewing the usual Neo-Realist appeal to our presumed socialist sympathies. *I Vitelloni* is not a political film in the usual mid-century Italian manner. Fellini gives us a quintet of heroes who, for the most part, aspire to be bourgeois big-shots of their shabby seacoast town. Not content with that, he makes them lazy, as well . . . and then he asks us to root for them, to actually like them! Needless to say, the intelligentsia of the period didn't warm to this film, even as the film-going public in Europe loved it, recognizing themselves and their friends and their own hometowns in it.

Just as Shakespeare shows us the brilliant results of striving within the non-negotiable limits of the nine-line sonnet or the blank verse of his plays, Fellini achieves genius in this film, stylistically, from the fruitful tension between the dictates of Neo-Realist imperatives (which no young Italian director of the Fifties could ignore if he wanted a career), and the dictates of his own vision. For, even while being a dutifully serious Neo-Realist (even to the point of employing a static, unblinking, non-flashy camera on the proceedings -- hardly the "Fellini-esque" style we would see in later years!), the director's penchant for the grotesque can no longer contain itself. In this film we get the aging, corpulent homosexual actor, with hair in need of a cut, noisily slurping up soup while one of the Vitelloni reads aloud to him some terrible play he has composed. We get the nauseous parties, in which Fellini tosses the Neo-Realist camera in the trash and picks up his own camera, swooping with it into the hot, frantic fray, honing in for sweaty close-ups, climbing the rafters for a dizzying aerial view, skewing the angles while watching an off-key trumpet player blare into the ear of a miserable drunk, and filling the screen with gigantic papier-mache clowns that constitute the floats of a Lenten parade. At the same time, the mandate to keep himself in check, or perhaps the humble desire to make an easily digestible movie, gives *I Vitelloni* the discipline and order so lacking in post-*8-1/2* Fellini films.

But the thematic meat of the movie provides the most fruitful tension. Fellini shows us the Vitelloni, the "guys", most of them creeping past 30, grasping after any passing pleasure that comes to hand, whether it be a woman (young or old, married or not, willing or not), a drunken night at the local pool hall, an attempt at petty thievery, a day of gambling at the races, or whatever. Then Fellini contrasts this with the older generation, tellingly single (their mates long buried), barely supporting the passel of lazy Vitelloni and assorted nieces and grandchildren who all lay about the family home. The old folks' sacrifices seem to have produced ignoble results, particularly within themselves: all too often, the old men and women are grouchy, unhappy, prone to fits of violence or weeping, and -- saddest of all -- lonely. The Vitelloni look at their elders, see the sterile results of lives rendered bereft by tradition and "sacrifice", and naturally rebel, searching in easy hedonism for the happiness that has eluded their parents. One character, a compulsive womanizer, plans on running away after he knocks up his girlfriend -- and why not? The womanizer's bitter father provides no wholesome example of "responsibility". Indeed, it seems as if the old man forces his son to marry the girl simply because he, the father, is friends with the girlfriend's father, and, after all, misery loves company. The question of whether or not the cad actually loves the girl is never asked. Guess how this marriage turns out.

Without unduly spoiling things, one of the Vitelloni actually DOES escape the shabby town by movie's end, but even here Fellini offers an unequivocal qualification: the character, staring out the window as the train pulls out, hangs his head and weeps. He knows, as do we, that he will be just as unhappy in Rome as he was in this fictionalized Rimini. Meanwhile, a young boy who works at the train station waves goodbye to the leaving train and turns his back on it, balancing precariously on a rail as he boyishly walks off. Fellini indicates that some people will simply be happier than others, no matter the circumstances: truly one of cinema's bleaker statements on the human condition.

*I Vitelloni* remains a great masterpiece, and is Fellini's most neglected film . . . though it somehow seems fitting that a movie which virtually INVENTED the notion of "slackers" should be forgotten. No matter: perfection is rarely popular, anyway. 10 stars out of 10.