Fellini's Roma

There’s something you need to know about FELLINI’S ROMA and you need to know it right up front.  FELLINI’S ROMA isn’t about anybody.  There’s no hero, no villain, no 2^nd act crisis and 3^rd act resolution.  Nothing happens; at least, not in the sense we usually mean when we discuss narrative film.

FELLINI’S ROMA isn’t a documentary, either.  It doesn’t set a scene, introduce us to players, and watch events unfold in a (hopefully) dramatic and interesting way.  It’s just – well, it’s just Rome.

But it isn’t just Rome: not really.  It’s Fellini’s Rome, or the parts of Rome that Fellini finds most interesting.  There’s Rome the Romantic, an idealized city that exists as not much more than a fantasy in the minds of Italian schoolchildren in the countryside.  There’s Rome the vulgar, Rome the sad, Rome the painted whore under an umbrella, slowly baking in scant shadow.  There’s the Rome of the hippies, of the workingmen, of the Church, and of the ancients.  There’s even the Rome of the apostates and the casually lost, the bright young men with futures and the masters at the top of their games.

FELLINI’S ROMA is like a slideshow, an experience meant to create a feeling of Rome rather than of a character in Rome.  If you can relax your expectations and go with it, it offers something of the experience of the wandering tourist.  Perhaps you speak the language; perhaps you catch only bits and pieces.  Scenes flash by on the road or in the piazza, and you come away not with a series of photos or cleverly written travel piece, but with a feeling, an impression of what it means to live there, what it means to visit, what it means merely to pass through on your way to someplace else.

Will you enjoy it?  I don’t know.  Should you see it?  Absolutely, for FELLINI’S ROMA will give you a sense of the city like no other.  It’ll give you a sense of the city as felt by a man who has contemplated it, dreamed it, lived it for years.  It’ll give you a sense of Rome.