Fellini - Satyricon

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Much your Usual Fellini...
Review: This film offers visually arresting images, set in an incoherent pastiche. Forget about the linear mode here (as so often with this director).

Fellini has a wonderful eye for faces and for grotesqueries. He has a strong sense of the dark and the compelling. These strengths are attended to in his Satyricon.

Fellini sometimes tends to work in fragments, without form or guiding direction. Don't look for plot in much of Fellini, and certainly not in his Satyricon. Those of us uncomfortable without straightforward plots will be uncomfortable with the Satyricon.

The movie's major strengths lie in the arresting vignettes of a Roman empire coming apart and jaded in its indulgences. There are historical truths hinted at here. But do NOT look for a coherent plot.

Rating:
Summary: Satire of the Satyr
Review: Some movies you just have to see -- forget about plot synopses or snippets of dialogue, you just have to see it to understand. For these movies, there's no way to answer that most natural and inevitable of questions: What's it about? Satyricon is one of these movies.

I've been a fan of Satyricon for about four years, when I first took it out of the public library. I'd heard it was weird and had also seem some stills in movie books like LIFE Goes to the Movies. Something about freaks, absurdity, ancient Rome, I gathered. Maybe that was actually as much as I needed to know since that's what it all boils down to, at its essence.

I probably would have had more of an idea what to expect that first if I'd simply known about the director, Federico Fellini. At that time, I didn't, and so when I first sat down with Satyricon it struck me not just as an anomaly but as a major shock. Sure, I'd heard of Fellini, but this? This was Fellini? Why hadn't anyone told me? They should have shown this movie to me while I was in the crib, it was so cool.

Later on, through watching another great and bizarre film of his, Roma, I figured out what some of the Fellini motifs were and how strongly his personality and taste come through, but at the time, it was a bit of a mind-blower. This guy had survived making this film? Nobody put him in an insane asylum? He was considered great? Certainly I thought he was great, watching the movie, but I tend not to give fellow humans that much credit.

Knowing a bit more about Fellini at this point, I can say that while Satyricon isn't the anomaly I once thought -- Roma is pretty similar and I've heard other of his films also follow along in a similar style -- it is certainly in a class of its own. What's it about? Again, I can't say really, but pressed to the wall with a gun to my head, I'd squeal and saying it's a crazy experience, a vicarious exploration of insanity, of dreams, of an absurd adventure by a blond-haired poet who just wants to get his boy lover back and be done with it all. That summary doesn't really express any of it, but it's the best I can do and there it is.

Perhaps giving a little background would help. First of all, Fellini didn't make the story up, although the film is certainly a product of his imagination and he did make up a few scenes. The plot, such as it is, springs from that most bizarre and unprecedented of ancient works, Satyricon by Petronius. Nobody actually knows much about the author and this is his only work, but what can be said is that it's a book very different from what most people would expect of an ancient book. You can actually get a hint of this by its very title, which is a pun on satyr (from the Greek saturos) and satire (from the Latin satira), meaning that it's an attack on human vice or folly and a depiction of some serious depravity. Did I mention that this was written around the time of the reign of Nero?

Again, having read the original book -- had to having seen the movie -- I can say that it's nothing like any ancient work I've ever run into except possibly the poetry of Catullus, which is hysterically coarse at times. It's simply not ponderous. It doesn't dwell on gods or philosophy or sublime human comedy. No, instead, the book just creates its own territories and definitions. People have tried to analyze it -- the fragments that are left, now that several sections have been missing for ages -- and the general conclusion, so I've read, is that the novel, like the movie, is something far afield from the norm, a twisted tale of such originality as to make analysis within normal frames of reference irrelevant.

The question resurfaces: What's it about? A few scenes may help to convey a sense of its atmosphere at least, if not the plot, since the plot is rather secondary. Picture this: Our hero (well, anti-hero really) Encolpio ends up on a mission to collect a hermaphroditic god(ess) from a hidden temple. He and his companions show up in a cave where they find the god(ess) pale and weak, lying in a pool surrounded by worshippers seeking to be healed. They steal the god(ess), throwing the deity into a cart and fleeing across the desert. Unfortunately the god(ess) is weak and needs water. The god(ess) dies and for that, there is a punishment.

Encolpio and friends end up in another town (where he ends up in a battle with a man wearing a bull mask... don't ask) and although Encolpio is basically rewarded by getting to bed an insatiable woman, he is embarrassed before a crowd of hundreds when he can't get it up. He's been made impotent! To make things better, he's sent to a special treatment facility where he's put in a room filled with dozens of extremely exotic prostitutes who proceed to try just about everything to get a rise out of him. They pin him down and flog him. There's something about a giant swinging canopy with bevies of girls on it but even thought I've seen the film a half dozen times, I can't remember the specifics, nor do I remember if the "cure" was successful. It's besides the point.

I do remember more, though. I know an Roman couple lives in home built into the base of a cliff. They end up committing suicide by slitting their wrists. Later Encolpio and friends run around inside their house and find an African slave girl who speaks in clicks and squawks. There's another big section with a huge ship on rough seas; they capture a giant creature that looks like an ancient depiction of a whale. There's a theater of the absurd, a gallery of freaks, a hysterically fake earthquake, a massively disgusting feast, and oh, it's all in dubbed Italian (at the time, the Italians dubbed over everything, even Italian) with the subtitles making some sense but not all that much since really you use your eyes to understand. Ah, why do I bother trying to explain? What does it add up to? What does it mean? What's it about? Go and see it -- that way you'll find out.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Greatest Movies
Review: Occasionally a movie comes along in which a simplistic, mono-dimensional meaning isn't laid out in such a way that even the laziest minds just couldn't miss it. I remember as a teenager seeing this movie for the first time, and being astounded that all that people seemed to see were shocking depictions of Roman decadence. I had sat through the movie amazed at its extraordinary cinematography, and overwhelmed by a moral story of epic proportions. Like most great art, the meaning of Satyricon is multi-layered, and reflects against itself enough to hold a richness of ambiguity that unfolds more for me each time I see it. I was also incredulous to read reviews accusing the movie of being formless. On the contrary, Fellini had created a beautifully structured work out Petronius' rather episodic tales.
Satyricon is a powerful portrayal of a young man's quest to rediscover the potency he has lost in a corrupt world (our world being no less corrupt than that of Fellini's Rome), both sexually and aesthetically. The events and characters in the movie resonate deeply with mythic archetypes, all playing a part in Encolpio's quest.
If you want a key for delving into the structural and metaphysical meaning of this movie, consider the two legacies of Eumolpus: the first he offers to Encolpius as they lie in the fallow fields after being evicted from Trimalchio's Feast, just as the dawning sun begins to lighten the sky. The second he leaves at the end of the movie to those who will consume his body. The first is the wealth of poetry, of the heavens, the earth, the air, of life itself. The second is worldly wealth and its corruptions. How beautiful is the moment when Encolpius joins the ecstatic, dancing, laughing servants of Eumolpus to sail away from the bizarre funeral feast to the true legacy of the great artist. So with us: what are we able to take from the legacy of Satyricon - does Fellini offer us merely a superficial indulgence in the perversity of Roman decadence .... or rather, are we able to comprehend his true gift, a profound vision of the potency of life itself?

Rating:
Summary: Fragments of beauty
Review: Just a few lines about a milestone of cinema (many others have written more and better about it than I do).
The book of Satyricon by Petronius has come only in non-coherent fragments to our time, and for that, it's the only adequate form Fellini choose to make this film, and shouldn't be critisized or mistaken as confusing pretentiousness and extravaganza.
Of course, it's not a "realistic" depiction of ancient Rome - it would be rather ambitious for any director to reconstruct authentically one of the many "lost worlds" - "Barry Lyndon" is still one of the best movies trying this impossible task. It's a brilliant idea of Fellini to show us bizarre and exotic images obviously deriving from all kind of cultures to remind us what an abyss of time and change separates us from the literature of antiquity.
Finally, one of the messages of the movie is strongly political: the future belongs to youth and freedom, while the old and corrupted bourgeosie is even eating the dead for money.
Well, call it naiv, call it nostalgic, but I think every lover of good cinema should have seen this beautifully set movie, even if it's just for listen to sequences in latin and ancient-greek, spoken by italians and greeks of our time...!

Rating:
Summary: You don't get it? You may be the one being taunted,friend.
Review: I firmly believe that if one does not "get" this film, then they are the type of person this film is satirizing. Something tells me that Fellini, with this film, came closer to illustrating the atmosphere of ancient Rome than anybody. It shows the pitfalls of superstition, how drugs and illusion play a role in what people have called "witchcraft","voodoo","macumba" and such. It shows the unmasked view of the delight that some people take in others' misery, in watching them suffer, and in confusing and bewildering them with smoke and mirrors. I enjoyed the scenes that depicted the morally reprehensible theatre of ancient Rome, especially in using period sound effects to illustrate how what we today see and hear in film and theatre is not so far advanced from the illusions that the ancient Romans used to propagandize and marginalize the lives of it's people. The parallel to modern society is so great that those who fit that materialistic mold won't get it, because their minds will protect them from the truth. However, we see over-indulgent despotic emperors using their wealth and power to seduce the minds of the populace. We see the same social elite engaging in disgusting orgies of food and sex. The main character, Encolpius, believing himself to be on a path of discovery is actually being lead through a maze of snares and traps at the delight of his so-called mentor. Soon one might be asking themselves if this man is mentor or tor-mentor to poor Encolpius. This film is a such a startling comparison to modern life that it could stop all temporal arrogance. How dare we think we're so advanced when our society behaves the same as they do, only the names and methods have changed. This is Rome, we live in Rome, it's only been transplanted over here and updated to "modern sensibilities" but Rome is still as decadent and wasteful as ever, as if we think we're rising above nature by destroying it. Well, isn't that how "civilization" works? Destroy one people's way of life and force them to conform to yours. This is Satyricon.

Rating:
Summary: This movie is terrible
Review: This was the first and the last Fellini movie I will ever purchase. The movie is totally incoherant. I do not see what is so compelling about this movie. It was a waste of my time.

Rating:
Summary: Singular Disaster
Review: "Fellini Satyricon" is the kind of truly awful movie that only a virtuoso of the first rank could make. Visually astounding, it is a must-have for anyone interested in film design or cinematography, which makes it pleasant to look at, not a good movie. I have now seen it three times. My reaction has remained remarkably constant, despite the fact that the screenings were separated by several years. For a while, the film's unique style leaves me stunned into silence. Say what you will against it, "Satyricon" looks like no other film, except those that have imitated it. (The film's real stars are cinematographer Guiseppe Rotunno and designer Danilo Donati.) After about a half hour, though, that astonishment, even admiration, starts to give way to tedium, then irritation, and eventually, outright hostility.

For it is possible to take just so much salacious tongue licking, rear ends wiggling at the camera, frantic sexual athletics and sweaty pointlessness, no matter how superbly lit, framed and cut, before the whole thing begins to pall. Based on Petronius's fragmentary novel of the same name, "Satyricon" makes no effort to tie events together, much less make us care what is going on. The film cuts from tableau to tableau, each conceived to stun, shock, overwhelm, not involve. Sometimes these scenes work. Often the film seems more a teenage romp through the costume shop after the high school pageant has finished. People are always shouting, gesturing lewdly, threatening the protagonist with death, rape or worse, throwing things at the camera, slobbering over unappetizing food before tearing into it, jumping about in hysterical abandon or lolling around like grotesque, over-sized slugs. It makes for a fantastic swirl all right, but then so does watching a Cuisinart, and I wouldn't want to do it for two hours.

That said, I'm more than happy that "Fellini Satyricon" exists. In a world of worn-out clichés passing as new movies, the sheer audacity of Fellini's style is--well, if not refreshing, at least a reminder that there is more to filmmaking than third-rate imitations of novels. (I may scream if another sanctimonious hack pronounces that films are "really" about telling stories.) The story in "Satyricon" barely exists, and what there is is a mess. The characters have less life than their costumes and the sets are more compelling than the shenanigans that take place in them. Still, "Satyricon," for all its failings, is the work of an original, a real filmmaker, someone who answers to no standards other than his own. That is always a dangerous course to take, because while the rewards can be incomparable when the director knows where he's going, they can just as easily result in wreckage like "Fellini Satyricon." The maker of "8 1/2" badly mis-steps this time around, but I still raise a toast to the effort.

Rating:
Summary: roasted pigs in space!
Review: FELLINI SATYRICON - the first film I experienced directed by Federico Fellini. I was with two or three other people in a small theater, and remember sitting through the movie with my jaw gaping like a little kid watching cartoons; I was on the edge of my seat. I walked out and spent an hour or so trying to figure out what the hell it was I just saw? Favorite scenes: Vernacchio, marriage at sea, minotaur. I later read that Fellini had always wanted to make a science fiction picture, and SATYRICON was the closest he would come to that goal.

Petronious Arbiter was a Roman scholar and poet who mixed with the courtesans of the emperor Nero. The remains of his writings are his observations of the world he lived; ultimately, he was "asked" by Nero to end his own life for various insults to the emperor. A strange, distant world is painted in the fractured remains of the Satyricon. Fellini used the text as a jumping off point to attempt to imagine a world completely alien to our own (images, sound, everything). Fueling this tour-de-force of invention is the period of the film's creation - the late sixties. If not directly quoted in its scenes, the spirit and free form of the late sixties definitely influenced Fellini and company.

BARBARELLA comes to mind as a comparison, in terms of color pallet, bizarre situations and a comic book quality - psychedelia at its finest. Fellini's interpretation of the Satyricon seems to capture that weird pulse of chaos and the "climate" of revolution; stripping away a mere "classic literature travelogue" approach - and presenting a libidinal sideshow of monsters, perverts, politicians, artists, and other variations of the human condition. The movie works like a dream, just presenting this river of existence that we follow through the misadventures of the main characters: Encolpio, Ascilto and Gitone. It's certainly a wonderful work of art and invention, among the best the cinema has provided thus far. Since its release, major filmmakers have dipped into this film for inspiration - Terry Gilliam, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, etc.

In the end, Encolpio's desperate way of life leaves nothing behind, except an expressionless face carved in stone amongst other faces. Life is short and fleeting. What will people two thousand years from now think of the way we live today? Trying to imagine a possible inkling of an idea to follow that question was all I could think about after walking out of FELLINI SATYRICON.

So, I'm not sure what you'd call this movie - science fiction? A comedy? CALIGULA on acid? I read [maybe in Playboy] that Fellini was asked to direct CALIGULA, and refused to take the job. Funny, that. Certainly SATYRICON is an entertainment of some kind? Whatever it is - definitely RENT it first.

Rating:
Summary: Very abstract
Review: I could not get "into" the movie. I've heard of this director before and I find it had to believe that his work is any good BASED ON THIS MOVIE. Definately not my kind of movie. Very abstract and unappealing.

Rating:
Summary: The Emperor's New Clothes
Review: Remember the old analogy of the Emperor's New Clothes? The joke was, he wasn't wearing any but no one had the courage to be the first to stand up and say as much. So consequently, everyone in town is praising the Emperor as he parades down the street in the nude.

Such is this film. It makes little sense. It makes me recall the infamous scene in Woody Allen's 1977 classic "Annie Hall", where the main character is standing in a movie line behind a pompous film professor from Columbia University. In the film, the pontificating professor berates Fellini as an "indulgent" filmmaker. After seeing Satyricon, I would have to agree with this judgement.

"Indulgent" is a great word to sum up this movie-going experience. It's what happens when an aging director who's word never gets questioned tries too hard to make a really psychedelic, sexy, disturbing, extravagant film that will hopefully break all bariers. Unfortunately, that's all giving Satyricon far too much credit.

One reviewer puts it best by simply stating that this film is boring. It is. For such "scandalous" scenes, scenarios, and settings, the story is almost non-existant, and as a result, the viewer is left wondering why they should even bother to pay attention. Without the premise of a believable linear story plot, there's little to focus on. The visuals and world music score get very old very quickly as the user acclimates to this strange new world. An hour and a half later, you're wondering if you should have popped a few pills or smoked a bit more of the old bong in order for anything to make sense.

This is a ridiculous and completely a-historical drama about nothing at all. It's too over the top without any real main characters, and certainly none that the viewer can identify with. In a nutshell, it's just a bunch of weird hippies doing weird hippie stuff. I suppose in its day it was impressive, but today it fails on all counts.

Stick with the earlier and far less abstract period of Fellini's career and you won't go wrong.