Hence, Fellini Satyricon, which is based on the partial remnants of an unfinished manuscript by the ancient Roman writer Gaius Petronius. Fellini takes full advantage of the fragmentary source material, using it to make a film that is not a linear progression of events, or even a non-linear progression of events, but rather a mosaic glued together almost at random. Characters fade in and out of the story, plot lines get added and dropped, dreams and stories constantly interrupt, and its ending is not only ambiguous, but literally happens in mid-sentence.

The story (if it can be called that) takes place in first-century Rome under Emperor Nero (which is the time period during which Gaius Petronius lived). However, this is not the historical Rome of textbooks or even the familiar imaginary Rome of great paintings. Rather, it is Fellini’s own dreamworld concoction, an evocative mirror-image of reality, one that infuses bits of history, but also applies liberal doses of vision and imagination (Fellini described the film as “science fiction of the past,” whatever that means). The whole film works as a dream, but just in case that isn’t enough, Fellini (who co-wrote the script with Bernardino Zapponi) inserts smaller dream sequences and stories and flashbacks, giving their trippy dreamscape even more depth (not intellectual or thematic depth, mind you, but just more of what the film has to offer). It’s like a wild, swirling painting that has been brushed onto a number of different canvases that have been laid on top of each other. Cutting through one canvas only leads you to part of another.

If there is a theme to Fellini Satyricon, it is debauchery, with Fellini holding pre-Christian pagan Rome up as a mirror to modern Rome. His point is that, while humanity may have progressed technologically, we are still the same selfish, rude, violent, sexual, greedy predators that we were a thousand years ago. The promiscuous bisexuality and gluttonous feasts in pagan Rome are no worse than the modern Roman orgies in Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). Of course, Cecil B. DeMille made the same argument in many of his films, especially his promiscuous jazz-era dramas of the 1920s, and one suspects that Fellini, like DeMille, is primarily attracted to the sensual overkill of it all, and the moral angle exists largely as after-the-fact rationalization. There is little if anything in the film itself to justify it as a moral condemnation of Godless culture, but there is plenty to suggest that Fellini is fascinated by the visual possibilities of sex, gluttony, and men in lipstick.

If there is any sense of hope in the film, it lies is in the ideas and imagination of youth, embodied here in three Roman students: Encolpius (Martin Potter), Ascyltus (Hiram Keller), and Giton (Max Born), the last of whom is such a vacant character that he hardly counts as anything more than a sexual pawn. These characters also serve as Fellini’s attempt to give us someone with whom we can identify amid the chaos, but there is little to hold our attention. We are never allowed time to understand or empathize with these characters, all of whom are played by largely unknown actors who were clearly cast more for their physical appearance than their acting prowess or screen presence. Instead, they tend to fade into the cluttered mosaic as just another face in the crowd.

But, that shouldn’t surprise us since the focus here is not on character, but on vision and spectacle—the Fellinesque, as it were. The film is lavish, to say the least, with bright costumes and gargantuan sets (one of which is destroyed in an earthquake that ends as suddenly as it begins). Rarely does a scene pass that is not densely packed, often with various human oddities whose physical differences come to stand in for the film’s overall sense of moral decay (a reading of the characters’ names in the end credits actually offers more entertainment than much of the film itself: Oriental Slave Girl, Owner of the Garden of Delights, Nymphomaniac, Nymphomaniac’s Husband, Nymphomaniac’s Slave, and Suicide Husband, to name a few). Fellini must have scoured the ends of the earth to find hunchbacks, dwarfs, an armless and legless midget, a hermaphrodite, and a number of people who can only be described as either grossly obese or genderless. The film is filled with bodies that are either excessive or lacking, with the exception of the three central characters, who are all model perfect, thus constructing a rather retrograde association with physical and moral deformity.

Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, with whom Fellini had worked previously on several films, captures the film’s bizarre proceedings and grotesqueries in outlandish, radiant hues (this was only the second of Fellini’s features to be shot in color). The action takes place in a wide variety of locales, from musty dungeons, to dining halls, to deserts, to ships in the middle of the ocean, and all of it is filmed as glorious, twisted spectacle. Much of it is beautiful, parts of it are fascinating, but more often than not it is just confounding, confusing, and even a bit irritating. Fellini is a master filmmaker to be sure, but sometimes artists are at their worst when they’re allowed to freely indulge their basest impulses, and it is of little surprise that, with the exception of Amarcord (1973), Fellini never made a better film than he did in the early ’60s.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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