Federico Fellini's AMARCORD, an acclaimed semiautobiographical episodic drama, examines life in a small Adriatic village just before Mussolini's reign in the 1930s. As the weather changes and spring arrives, the village holds a festival in which it burns a symbolic bonfire and celebrates new life. This gathering in the central square is the first of many others throughout the film. Each time the community assembles, its colourful members show themselves in full force, boasting their bizarre, disjointed personalities--and pure mischief is the result. Several of the village ladies wear their eyebrows pencilled on in high, provocative arches, a style that seethes sex and drama, coaxing the camera to follow them. The film takes on a circusy, chaotic tone, making it difficult to see a clear plot structure; AMARCORD instead breaks up into several memorably surreal sequences, a few of which follow a young man named Titta (Bruno Zanin, who represent the director himself), who wanders in and out of the animated provincial landscape obsessing over sex, meeting assorted crazy characters such as his parents, his lascivious grandfather, a dizzy hairdresser in search of her "Gary Cooper," and a mad uncle who straddles a tree demanding sex. The beautiful clashes with the grotesque and politics and family matters blend together while sex is offset by violence in the inimitable style of Italy's late master of cinema whose tour de force won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
This dazzling blend of autobiography, fantasy and wickedly precise satire from Federico Fellini deftly taints childhood memory with adult insight. It's set in a seaside town not dissimilar to Fellini's native Rimini. In addition to mocking Mussolini's regime, Roman Catholicism and the prejudices and peculiarities of the parochial bourgeoisie, Fellini assembles a wonderful cast of characters that are as human as they are grotesque. Touching, coarse and comic, this movie, which won the Oscar for best foreign film, is a must for fans and a superb introduction to the work of a great artist for the yet-to-be-converted.
Radio Times
