FELLINI SATYRICON Movie Review

Satyricon

Using the Satyricon of Petronius as a jumping off-point, Federico Fellini created the first historical head film, and right on time; the picture became a cult item in American art houses less than a year after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But issues of timing aside, it's difficult to argue with assessments like the one by Pauline Kael, who found Fellini Satyricon to be “full of cautionary images of depravity that seem to have come out of the imagination of a Catholic school-boy.” For this viewer, however, those images can't be dismissed simply because the primal fears they sprang out of aren't sophisticated—the artist who put them on the screen sure is. I recently watched an A & E Biography program on Caligula, and it contained every bit as much of the detailed “depravity” that you'll find in Fellini Satyricon, but none of the beauty. And that, of course, is what you remember from Fellini's thrillingly imaginative film—the darkly shimmering, labyrinthine, widescreen images; the sexual pleasures of a world that hasn't yet passed judgment on sexual pleasures (even if the director has); the fragmented, splintered, fantastic universe that is far closer to science-fiction than it is to historical epic. (Looking at the film today, one almost expects it to open with the words: “A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.”) There's no such thing as a movie that's beyond criticism, but there is such a thing as a movie I choose to accept—even embrace—in the same way I accept an obsessive trait in a trusted friend. That person's fantasy may not be one I would have conjured myself, but that's the whole point of going to the movies. I'm a sucker for hearing about a really good dream.

NEXT STOP … Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's Roma, Fellini's Casanova

1969 (R) 129m/C IT Martin Potter, Capucine, Hiram Keller, Salvo Randone, Max Born; D: Federico Fellini; W: Federico Fellini; C: Giuseppe Rotunno; M: Nino Rota. Nominations: Academy Awards '70: Best Director (Fellini). VHS, LV, Letterbox MGM, FCT, TVC