Amarcord (the title literally means “I remember” in the dialect of Emilia-Romagna, the region in which the director was born) is Fellini’s quirky look back at his own childhood in the Italian seaside town of Rimini in the 1930s. But, being a Fellini film, it is hardly a straightforward look back to the past; Fellini eschews the nostalgic fondness of autobiographical detail for elements of the cartoonish and the carnivalesque, the surreal and the quirky. Amarcord is less about a specific past than it is about how one might remember and understand that past, filtered through life’s experiences--its ups, its down, its tragedies, its triumphs. The overall tone of Amarcord is one of bemused humor laced with scathing satire of provincial life’s willingness to bow to fascism.

Fellini’s screenplay (which he cowrote with the prolific screenwriter Tonino Guerra, with whom he would later work on two other films) is structured around individual events, rather than the cause-and-effect linkages that would bring all those events together into a coherent narrative. This is not to say that the film does not have form; in fact, especially considering the majority of Fellini’s increasingly bizarre output in the 1970s, Amarcord is one of his most accessible films.

If one could say there is a central character in the film, it is the Biondi family, which Fellini draws in broad, humorous strokes, yet still leaves room for unexpected affection and love. The father (Armando Brancia) is loud and brash, and his wobbly position as head of the family is visually satirized by his bald dome and a large, raised mole on the top of his head. The mother (Pupella Maggio) struggles to maintain composure in holding the family together, yet is ultimately just as loud and quick-tempered. Her brother, Patacca (Nando Orfei), is a budding fascist who eats dinner with a hairnet. And then there’s Titta (Bruno Zanin), the teenage son who frequently incurs his father’s wrath just for existing. Titta is what might be labeled the “Fellini surrogate,” as he represents life’s potential in all its awkward, optimistic, sexually excitable glory.

The best scenes in Amarcord are the ones in which Fellini takes fascism to task, reducing it to a ridiculous ideology based largely on immaturity. In a well-known essay titled “The Fascism Within Us,” Fellini compared fascism with adolescence, an apt comparison if ever there were one. Fellini depicts the fascists as trite and silly, and their attempts at cruelty and intimidation (like force-feeding castor oil to enemies, an actual practice) come across like schoolyard bullying of the most desperate variety. Their overblown ideology and wayward sense of self-importance is best exemplified in an extended parade sequence, which culminates with a giant, flower-encrusted Mussolini face being raised for worship even as the entire event is reduced to a budding fascist-adolescent’s fantasy about marrying his dream girl. Even fascism cannot control the id.

And, as it does in most of Fellini’s films, sexuality runs rampant throughout Amarcord, perhaps enhanced by the haze of memory. We get caricatures like Volpina (Josiane Tanzilli), the town’s purring, barefoot nymphomaniac, and Gradisca (Magali Noël), who is the local hairdresser but, considering the way she holds herself and the way people treat her, might as well be a movie star. Fellini’s obsession with large breasts and big rear ends runs into near absurdity, supplying the film with some of its funniest moments, including the scene in which Titta gets more than just an eyeful of the cartoonishly busty woman who runs the tobacco store (Maria Antonietta Beluzzi).

With its bright, sharp cinematography and beautiful score by Fellini regular Nino Rota, it is sometimes a little too easy to just sink into the spell Amarcord casts, seeing it primarily as a wistful-funny dream of times past. Yet, as much as the film works on this level, it is also a scathing indictment of both repressive authority and common people’s willingness to submit to it. The town goes about its life as Mussolini’s dictatorship reaches the zenith of its popularity, and even though Fellini mocks the fascists and all that they stood for with a tone of wink-wink absurdity, it is hard not to see the specter of World War II just over the horizon, casting a looming shadow that would swallow the world.

Copyright ©2006 James Kendrick

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