Federico Fellini goes decadent chic detailing pre-Christian Rome as a sort of Euro-Trash orgy & spa for the freakish & depraved. It’s Fellini at his most wasteful, overloading with a thousand and one ideas to hide a basic poverty of imagination. Loosely taken from Petronius, itself a thing of patches (most of the book is considered lost), the story echoes one of those Greek wandering epics, here with a pair of brotherly students fighting over a boy-toy in a series of near-miss adventures on land & sea while the political & social pecking order shifts on report of dying Old Caesar (Tiberius?) and rising New Caesar (Nero?). Here & there, when he’s not overloading the screen with busy detail, Federico hits on a striking composition (a textured wall, a small elephant in the background, a ship silhouette) that freezes (friezes?) to display the sense of utter strangeness a more disciplined film might have shaped from the material. But Fellini never fully recovered from the (well-deserved) international success of 8½ and hid an essential emptiness of spirit with excess everything. Even the best of his later work suffers from too-much-of-a-good-thing syndrome. It leaves SATYRICON looking like an artistic cry for help against a sea of enablers.
DOUBLE-BILL: The sheer strangeness of Fellini’s ancient world was enough of a break from standard issue SPQR to boost the film’s initial impact & rep. (Ironically, it was made at Cinecittá, right next to the usual Sword-and-Sandals/Peplum crap.) Yet it’s equally unconvincing on its own terms. Per cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, Fellini thwarting realism on purpose. (For a physical Rome you can believe in, catch the superb production design & color palette achieved by Tony Walton & Nicolas Roeg in A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM/’66 for Richard Lester. No kiddin’.)
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