I was discussing with my friend Mathi regarding how great directors like K. Balachander and Bharathiraja are not able to come up with a master piece in recent times which used to be their habit. The reason I was able to come up is that at some point of time, they yielded to audience’s artistic and moronic confrontation to bend and break their belief in their work. In simple words, they decided to make movies for the audience then for themselves. It might surprise some one as how ridiculous this statement is as the movie is for the audience. Wrong. An art reaches its true form when the artist convinces himself to the conscience of moulding it how he wants to. The awards, glory, fame, scrutiny, defamation comes as a bonus or curse to it. And “Federico Fellini’s 81/2” is the paradox of it with the fight of creative questioning of his life and work.Charlie Kauffman’s inspiration for “Adaptation.” should have been Fellini. The screenplay, concept and the self indulgence are classic text book information to be in common in Kauffman’s work. And how well a director can produce a work like this that sometimes the inspiration is subconscious. The movie’s release would have been a slap in the face of the critics and the audience who regarded and disregarded the director’s works. He does not take sides but gives the truth of lies. It gives the chaos of organization and presentation of a material super imposed by the gargantuan expectations and glory of the business of entertainment. How tough is to be honest especially in an arena which are fake in reality? It does not happen but it tells something. For once, fake does help out the truth in life. The film is irony and paradox sprouting every minute either reeking or satiates our senses to taste the smell.
Such is the human condition that we exhaust the possibilities of limitless creativity to an extent of void and vagueness. Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) has exhausted his possibilities of lying. Marcello has a face of hedonistic depression. His Marcello in “La Dolce Vita” succumbed to the pleasures of showbiz and in the end; he exhausts the possibilities in that too. Here it can be considered as its sequel in a way. The young at start and old at the end Marcello starts where he ended out there. Of course it is a different person but the personalities remain. Guido is a Marcello in every way except that some where in his life, he fell for the system. He gets married. One cannot blame Luisa (Anouk Aimée) for despising every single word Guido spits out of the mouth so seasoned to tell the lies in a respectable and believable fashion. And it is good enough fuel to burn her in rage and frustration to boost her energy in loathing him.
The film is a confession. The realistic dreams and the loops of mistakes of Guido taking form over the screen is how we see it. The movie gives the film which is criticized and named unmarketable by Guido’s advisors and producers. The enormity and the lies Guido has created gave the producer to erect the biggest hoax of the science fiction. But it has a meaning too in the end. Everything makes sense and senseless for Fellini. It is autobiographical but the separation leads to the “The Beautiful Confusion” as Fellini wanted it to be named.
The title represents the number of films Fellini made including this one. The half constitutes his short film. The title another sample of his self indulgence. At many times, the actors/actresses speak to the camera directly signifying the nature of the story towards Fellini. We see shadow partially and some times completely covering Guido’s face to enigmatically show the silhouette. Any one can fit into those chambers of façade and gloominess.
Fame, fortune and falsification go hand in hand in the world of luxurious compulsion to pleasure. Some time it becomes them and they are defined by it. There is no absolution and no redemption. Fellini tells through Catholicism and its connotation of looking down the sins and secrecies. Humiliation is the punishment to redeem one from those sexual instincts and behaviour as the advocates of the religion impose. If the story telling and screenplay is far far ahead of its time, the drowsy movement towards a particular focus of interest and use of shadows and lights is Gianni Di Venanzo excellence challenging the current cinematographers and many others to come. His camera operates in an unhurried manner and befittingly swelter the crux of the scene. Leo Catozzo’s editing weaves the stage of these events to perfectly display what Fellini intends to. We never really know the truth and lies of Guido. We cannot identify the film as a representation of real events but is based upon it. Guido’s view or Fellini’s view are perplexed by this unusual conclusion and it does the same to us. And we see the protagonist accepting who he is and continues his life of lies but truthful in telling it to Luisa, may be.
And the appreciation of those beautiful women cannot be a symbolization of those attractions Fellini had but quite a direct show piece. But in those faces of his mistakes, he finds the angels. When we wander through every day life, we encounter the nature’s sin of beauty. It initially signifies and makes us to conclude to hide their actual soul. Then we fall for it and when we learn some of the ugliness in it, the face disappears. But before that, they are the fantasies of the world of termed perversion. Guido associates and chronicles the beauties he encountered in life through his hallucination of movie making. That scene of depiction of illusion with exploitation and philosophical conclusion alone makes this a master piece.
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