disgusting, overrated, pointless

Absolutely Fantastic

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

I really don't understand why this movie is so highly regarded. (Could say the same for most of Fellini's movies, in fact). A rambling pointless movie with no discernible plot. At best it's a tourism advertisement for Rome.There are sparks of life and point. The Catholic cardinals prancing around as models in a fashion show was quite funny, and a bit of an stab at how the clergy tries to be hip, in a phony sort of way. Also, the stabs at the idleness and anarchy of the younger generation. Most importantly, how a city, and civilization as a whole, changes with the times.Unfortunately, these points are brief and are not followed through. Plus there is no connection between these brief sparks of life. It's all fairly random.

Whether for literature, theater or any art of storytelling, there can't be a plot without characters to drive it. Yet characters don't imply a specific plot and this might be the area where theater slightly surpasses literature, as an art of 'presence' and 'personalities' mirroring our condition. More than anything, it's a show, an invitation for eyes, for ears, for feelings. And emotions can do without plots.And here we have Fellini draining his talent from the Antic Roman-Greek tragicomedy, Commedia del' Arte, Opera and maybe more than anything, from his Italian roots so devoted to fun and entertainment. More than any other director, Fellini understood the virtue of Cinema as a new form of theater, a show that doesn't rely on plots or screen writing techniques, he shoots first and we ask the question later. And what a show! Fellini will forever be admired and never equaled, thanks to his unique talent to inhabit his films with unforgettable galleries of characters: eccentric, larger-than-life, decadent, greedy, gluttonous, sensual, ugly, outcast, colorful faces with anonymous names and universal and timeless appeals. These people feel real because they FEEL. And we're so hypnotized by the images that we forget to care about a plot.My repetition of the word 'plot' is only an anticipation of some rational comments on Fellini's "Roma" or, "Fellini's Roma", I must say. Yes, the film doesn't have a plot, even to those who set their minds for a surrealist tour orchestrated by the ultimate cinematic ringleader, Il Maestro Fellini. Even "8½" chronicled the very process of film-making from the author's boiling mind, even the previous "Fellini's Satyricon" was a take on a myth that had a story to tell, no matter how disjointed it felt. Even the nostalgic vignettes of "Amarcord" made a coherent ensemble, but "Fellini's Roma" has no focus whatsoever.But does it need one when the scope is so large, when Rome is the main protagonist? Rome... such a myth of a city that it transcends all the periods, visions and artistic possibilities. The film is constantly inhabited by Rome's aura from Fellini's perspective, hence the title. For "Satyricon", it was a legal necessity to distinguish from two films with the same title, to establish Fellini's independence from the original myth. "Roma" similarly establishes Fellini's independence, except that this time, no other vision of Rome could ever compete with Fellini's or approach the town with the same masterful audacity.Now, why a film about "Rome"? My guess is that it's one of the few privileged cities whose name evoke fascinating contradictions. "Rome is the city of illusions. Not only by chance you have here the church, the government, the cinema. They each produce illusions." This is Gore Vidal speaking in a memorable cameo and it's probably the closest rational conclusion that can come out of this mesmerizing mess. And "illusion" is the key word, whether it's the illusion of church that ignited the faith of generation of Italians without abjuring them from that lust for life and voluptuous bodies so rooted in the Italian lifestyle, for politics that have plunged post-War Italy into the darkness of fascism and yes, even Cinema doesn't escape criticism.Behind Fellini's eye, Rome oscillates between dazzling magnificence and nightmarish decadence. Fellini appears twice, as a young idealistic man who discovers the town, eats some spaghetti with the population, goes to the music-hall or visits a brothel, and the older real-life Fellini discussing with the new generation of Romans on how to make an accurate portrayal of the city. And it's ironic how nothing changed much between these times, "O Tempora! O Mores", yet Mussolini's Italy was as noisy, lusty and turbulent as in 1972, and ironically, "Roma"'s self-referential aspect illustrates the fact that both embellishment and derision rely on caricatures, the very illusions Fellini admits in his own filmmaking process.And illusion contributes to the film's most enigmatic moments: a parade of prostitutes tempting their clients, with sensual bodies to better hide the lucid tiredness in their faces, the scene followed by a sort of ecclesiastic fashion contest. Through the intriguing parallel, the iconoclast Maestro doesn't attack church but the myth of virtue that ignores the real sacred Trinity outside the Vatican border: life, love and lust. His fantasy vision works like a missing link between the eternal myth of Roma and reality. When thinking of Roma, we'll either have a vision of the Coliseum, of a fat Italian with huge bosoms serving a large plate of pasta on a summer evening, or maybe a beautiful red-haired and red-dressed woman sensually dancing at the moonlight of a lamppost, perhaps the greatest cinematic allegory of any town.And if the film works without characters, it does as well without a plot because Rome is that sensual woman with a history, a present, a future and a past. You can't dig a subway tunnel without bumping on archaeological relics hidden in its prolific womb, like a woman who hasn't revealed all her secrets. And one of the most poignant moments occurs when engineers find Antic frescoes in a tunnel, preserved just as if they were painted the day before, before oxygen destroys them instantly. That's the price you pay when you have a clear glimpse on reality, imagining how Romans were would have been more salutary for its (or her) own history. And this is the power of imagination, of illusion over reality or any myth of grandeur. No need for a plot when you have such a wonderful protagonist that encapsulates all the values Italians will forever stand for, and who more entitled than Fellini to share with us a part of his vision? And no need for specific characters when you have the Italians. A famous Italian actor, if I recall correctly, said something like "In Italy, there are about thirty millions actors, the rest of the population star in movies". This quote could have been the film's tag-line.

It's hard for me to render an objective verdict on Fellini Roma because, while being a rather unbalanced film--containing some trite stuff along with cinematographic gold--it also includes three episodes that fascinate me. The first one directly involves something I love, that's the journey of the film crew along the tunnel of the subway in construction. There is something surreal about that segment, something that gives it an out-of-this-world quality, while still belonging to our day to day, trivial reality. In my I Vitelloni review I said that Fellini had the capacity of making classics out of the most ordinary situations and this scene proves it. Because there's nothing in such episode that doesn't belong to our everyday reality, yet the feeling is that of a magical journey, something out of a fable. For ex., when the engineer orders to activate the cutter, what comes next doesn't look like a simple mechanical procedure, the drilling of a rock, but as it he had awakened instead a prehistoric monster, a dragon who was sleeping in the depths of the Earth and who starts suddenly breathing, slowly raising on its hinged legs over the men, thrusting its Alien-like jaws towards them. Here's is where Fellini's cinematographic genius appears at its best, as scenes like that one we may have seen many times in the news in TV, in civil engineering films, yet here the thing becomes surreal, straddles the realm of the fantastic. And all those effects, the eerie atmosphere, have been achieved simply with camera angles, lightning, the hovering dust, and the fact that all we hear is the life-like roar of the cutter. But he goes even further, he flirts also with the esoteric: even before the crew gets into the 2000-year Roman house, we viewers see what it's inside. Amazingly enough, one of the frescoes contains the uncannily accurate portrait of one of the crew members, who starts at that very moment feeling sick. Coincidence? Point for reincarnation? Lots to ponder there.The second episode I loved is that of the chaos in the highway, specially the night scenes. Compare the incredible vivacity of it, the joyous exuberance, the pulsating life of the city in the midst of the mass of intermingled cars, trucks; in the cacophony of innumerable horns; in all the dirty gestures, smirks, stares flying from car to car and back; in the stoic, angry, perplexed expressions in mirrors, windows, windshields--all that while the camera boom goes up and down, right and left--compare this magnificent chaos with the dead--fish opening of 8½. No way: on one hand we got a Fellini in full possession of his means, at the peak of his artistic creativity; on the other, an spiritually dead, practically sterile Fellini.The third episode I love here is the Vatican fashion show. As I've said about Buñuel, fans of Fellini tend to sell him short when it comes to social, political or religious commentary. True, they may be thinking they are just throwing jabs but, as irrepressible artists they are, the end result has always had a much greater reach. Think of Cervantes, who all what he wanted was to ridicule the Harry Potters of his day and who ended up penning instead the greatest literary work in History. That's how I see works where Buñuel or Fellini seem just being mean to the Church, the elites: they just can't help going far beyond that, reach new levels. Being neutral in the subject I find a subversive beauty in this scene, even if taken as mockery--not to mention the fact that there's nothing that excludes that the Church actually does some kind of exhibition when studying new trappings for its members. But the beauty of that scene, at least for me, it's in that it escapes the purely derisory and becomes--once again--a surreal experience, to which contributes much the haunting Rota score. The only thing I didn't get was the arrival of the old man with glasses who brings the house down, so to speak. "Our Pope is back!". What was the meaning of that, the Second Coming, a return to happier times?.Oh, the movie itself is a itinerary through time of the historic Rome from the 1930s to 1972, all seen through Fellini's eyes and life experience, yet you are never allowed to forget that this is a city thousands of years old. From the initial shot of a stone road sign, to a school principal talking to students about Cesar and crossing the Rubicon himself; to the movies in the matinée; to the ruins of buildings & monuments that liter the landscape, we are being constantly reminded that this isn't just a city that has lived through History but one that also contains History, one that's History itself, the cradle of our Western civilization nothing less. And this is Fellini's homage to it.Fellini Roma has no plot to properly speak of, just vignettes through time & place; the lives of Romans under Fascism, during war—including the ways they used to have a good time: communal diners, Variety shows, movie matinées--up to present day 1972, with the problems usual to urban sprawl: pollution, subway construction, hippies and other assorted malcontents. Fellini's cinematography is there and so his weird looking people with their odd behavior. In all it makes for an entertaining film, except for the bordello scenes, which I found rather long and tedious. I give it a 7.5/10 but I'll add 0.5 just because I loved that underground scene—what can I do, it's that personal background kicking again.

This film consists of many different mini films within a film and all are tied together because they have something (no matter how tenuous) to do with Rome. Some are rather touching, some are very crude, some are meant to be very offensive but none of them were boring and all were accompanied by the usual cast of Felliniesque extras (ugly people, huge breasted whores and the like).If I had been in Fellini's shoes back in the early 1970s, I might have been tempted to do what he did with ROMA. Instead of a traditional narrative or plot, he just took disparate images and segments having to do with Rome and tossed it all together into a compote of sorts without a lot tie it all together. What could be easier? While a new or struggling director would have probably been ignored or castigated for such excess and lack of discipline, since it was the great Fellini, then it was the work of an artiste. In other words, since he'd attained great international fame by creating some wonderful films, now he was free to screw around and do anything he wanted and STILL pack theaters and make the critics happy! Talk about a great life! Now as for me, I have a habit of being a nay-sayer--someone who often tries to see things from a different point of view. And while I used to think Fellini was an overrated "genius", in recent years I have come to realize he was a great director as evidenced by LA STRADA and so many other great works. Unfortunately, because I also buck conventional wisdom, I also feel that starting in the 1960s, sometimes the director created some awful films that were adored by snobs but left the common man wondering if either the critics were nuts or they were. Frankly, after seeing SATYRICON, CASSANOVA and ROMA (all films that often carried Fellini's name on the title), I think I know the answer to that! If you like surrealistic and artsy films that make you feel smug in your own sense of self-importance, then by all means watch and enjoy this film. As for me, I just think all these films were really a form of self-parody and Fellini was just having a laugh at the expense of his die-hard fans. As for me, I think I'd rather have a migraine than see this film again--no matter how good some parts of the film were.FYI--A warning to parents. This film has quite a bit of nudity featuring very unattractive women's breasts. There is also a scene where a little kid pees in the aisle of a theater--something I didn't need to see. Additionally, there is a rather irreverent jab at the Church near the end, so parents should exercise some caution before letting their kids see this--but on the other hand, what kid would WANT to see this?!