Italian Film Festival - Roma

Roma

"Fellini's Roma" is perhaps three-quarters Fellini and one-quarter Rome; a very good proportion for a movie. Although an appreciation of the city informs every part of the movie, Rome is not so much the subject as the occasion for a film that is not quite fiction and surely not fact, but rather the celebration of an imaginative collaboration full of love and awe, suspicion, admiration, exasperation and a measure of well-qualified respect. It is also, for me, the most enjoyable Fellini in a dozen years, the most surprising, the most exuberant, the most beautiful, the most extravagantly theatrical. The audience I saw it with kept interrupting the film with applause. This isn't something you normally do at the movies, but it seems proper enough for "Fellini's Roma."It is altogether typical of Fellini that he should film his "Roma," his tribute to a great city, mostly indoors on a sound stage.