AND THE SHIP SAILS ON Movie Review

El la Nave Va

One of the most unjustly neglected of Fellini's later films (along with Ginger & Fred), And the Ship Sails On is a nearly plotless epic about the various passengers who've gathered on a fabulous ocean liner in the early 1900s to be on the final journey with a legendary opera star. If the jaw-droppingly realistic, digitally enhanced recreations of James Cameron's Titanic inspire a very specific kind of awe in moviegoers, then Fellini's defiantly unreal ship of dreams is both its antithesis and its equal. From the painted, two-dimensional backdrops assembled at impossible scale and angles, to the gently undulating ripples of plastic sheeting that stand in quite elegantly—and dryly—for waves, this is a fantastic frigate. It's like German expressionism with a sense of humor, a child's Color-forms construction come to life. The passengers are no less stylized, and the reporter who speaks directly to the audience throughout is played by British actor Freddie Jones, whose larger-than-life features earned him prime spots in David Lynch's The Elephant Man and Dune. At well over two hours, And the Ship Sails On takes its time. But since it really has no particular place to go, the journey is all the fun. It's best enjoyed as a vacation as vacations ought to be—all anticipation, all what if, a dream of genuine, otherworldly escape that somehow never seems as exquisite as the travel folders promise but that we know exists somewhere. Reality, like beauty, can often be in the eye of the beholder—and what a beholder Federico Fellini was.

NEXT STOP … Amarcord, 81/2, Stagecoach (1939)

1983 (PG) 130m/C IT Freddie Jones, Barbara Jefford, Janet Suzman, Peter Cellier, Philip Locke; D: Federico Fellini; W: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra; C: Giuseppe Rotunno; M: Gianfranco Plenizio. VHS, LV COL