R.I.P. Anita Ekberg

Legendary Swedish film actress Anita Ekberg has died at the age of 83. She romped in Rome's Trevi Fountain for Fellini's iconic film "La Dolce Vita"...and then touchingly reunited with the director and her co-star Marcello Mastroianni for the 1992 film "Intervista," Fellini's faux-documentary about himself (previously here).

Witness the bittersweet moment when Ekberg and Mastroianni watch their younger selves on screen, in this clip from "Intervista"...

R.I.P. Anita Ekberg. Your beauty lives on.

Just watched...

...Fellini's "Intervista."


This penultimate film by The Maestro Fellini is what you would expect from the master of Surrealist Cinema, but the manic imagery and the dizzying rush of the story from his earlier days had mellowed by the time he made “Intervista” (or “Interview” in English) in 1987. Like a wine whose flavors have blended and smoothed with age, Fellini’s imagination too had blended and become more complex. “Intervista” is an intimate glimpse into the thought process of one of the most creative figures in film history and it could only have been made by a mature, skilled and experienced Fellini. The film shows the understanding and acceptance of a man who has lived, a man who has cultivated a life and been cultivated by life, a man who is wise; this is not to say a man who is perfect and understands life in toto, but one who has reconciled himself, one who has acquiesced to all that life is and can be.

“Intervista” is a bit like a set of Russian nesting dolls with films within stories within films within preparing to make a film. It starts with a simple enough premise: while Fellini is directing a film, a Japanese camera crew arrive to interview him for a documentary. But that premise quickly takes on an additional layer as Fellini tells them the story of the first time he came to Cinecittà, the Roman studio compound where he ended up making most of his films. This story turns out to be something that Fellini is filming. We become immersed in watching the construction of sets, and casting actors for this memory, only to seamlessly enter the memory itself without any warning. From there we bounce back and forth between Fellini’s interview, his memories, his directing the filming of said memories, Fellini casting for and shooting an adaptation of Kafka’s AMERIKA, and a film about it all. Fellini’s actual entourage and crew play themselves in the film, including his real-life cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli and assistant director Maurizio Mein. But the most surprising cameos come from Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, the two stars of Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece “La Dolce Vita.” At Cinecittà, Fellini stumbles upon Marcello who is making a commercial for a brand of detergent. Fellini and entourage whisk Mastroianni away to the Roman countryside where they arrive at the home of Anita Ekberg. An impromptu party ensues and Marcello magically conjures up a sheet on which is projected scenes from “La Dolce Vita.” From the privacy of the opposite side of the sheet, Mastroianni and Ekberg reunite to watch their iconic Trevi Fountain scene, and to watch themselves frolic in the water nearly thirty years before. It is a lovely, poignant, heartbreaking, and heartwarming moment in cinema history, one which makes us yearn for other such reunions. Imagine Bogart and Bergman, as themselves sometime in the 70s, watching themselves in “Casablanca.” It gives me goosebumps.

The mood of “Intervista” is tender, loving and surprisingly upbeat and buoyant. Fellini allows us to slip effortlessly with him between memory and current life, between film and reality, in front of and behind the camera. It is a loving ode to cinema, to this kind of storytelling, and to a life dedicated to this pursuit.

Recommend? I am a huge Fellini fan so of course I am going to respond with an enthusiastic “Yes!”

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Just RE-watched...

...Fellini's masterpiece "La Dolce Vita" from 1960.

Hot on the heels of my recent trip to Italy, I just watched “La Dolce Vita,” Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece and bridge between his Neo-Realism roots and the Surrealism fueled by dream logic and dream imagery that he later explored and embraced. I watched this film twenty-some years ago, at a time when I had yet to visit Rome (I had somehow managed to skip Rome and see only Florence and Venice). I thought that seeing the film now, after a fresh trip to the Eternal City would be fun and allow me to see familiar sights. But Fellini was very careful to limit shots of ruins or anything that identifies the city to the rest of the world. Instead, he shows us row after row of sterile, concrete apartment buildings—many still under construction—and entire new Mussolini-style areas on the desolate outskirts of Rome in an effort to show the financial revitalization that was taking place in an Italy that had been devastated by the war (and also, I suspect, as an effort to remove himself from the squalid concerns of Neo-Realism). There are however, some shots that are memorable and identifiable such as the opening sequence with helicopters flying an enormous statue of Christ over some ruins, the city, and finally to the Vatican. And then there is the iconic scene of two main characters in the Trevi Fountain (you can't get much more Roman than that) in the middle of the night. So all is not lost.

A loose narrative follows Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a photojournalist, through the celebrity and jet-set littered landscape of mod-era Rome. Often at his side is a photographer named Paparazzo, ready to snap pictures of celebrity fights and trysts. With this character, Fellini actually (and inadvertently) invented the term “paparazzi” to mean annoying and intrusive photographers.

We follow Marcello from the glamorous Via Veneto, to his stifling relationship with the suicidal Emma, to his affair with wealthy, world-weary Maddalena, to his flirtation with international sex symbol and actress Sylvia. Along the way, he realizes his life is not what he intended it to be. Longing for the life of a genuine writer and not a gossip columnist for newspapers, he sees the decadence and futility of the slick, glittery life surrounding him, but is unable to escape its pull. Along the way we encounter some truly magical episodes and imagery such as a sad clown in a nightclub being followed by a herd of balloons, two children literally leading a huge crowd of pilgrims on a wild goose chase around a field as they pretend to see an apparition of the Madonna, and a party of aristocrats in tuxedoes and Balenciaga gowns hunting ghosts in a dilapidated villa. At the end of our time with Marcello, we see that he has devolved into a bitter, cruel and helpless man. Like the dead sea monster the party-goers find on the beach at dawn in the final scene of the film, he is dead inside, bloated and useless, unable to communicate.

Recommend? YES! It is a classic film with iconic imagery and plays a huge role in the history of cinema. SEE IT!