My Birthday Movie Review:
Fellini SATYRICON
Rome. Before Christ. After Fellini.
The film I'm going to discuss is the 11th film of the well known eccentric italian director Federico Fellini, who "is recognized as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time."
The film Satyricon premiered in Italy one day after my birthday at 3rd of september, 1969. (I hope that's close enough.)
Although I know other Fellini films (like La Dolce Vita and La Strada), I've never seen Satyricon before. So I was really looking forward to.
At first it was very hard for me to find a legal online stream of it. So I switched between a version with french subtitles (which I let automatically translate into german) and an english subtitled version.
Visuals and Sound
The cinematography (by Giuseppe Rotunno) looks awesome and colorful, a surreal image-orgy. The set was build with much love to the details. There are even some special visual effects in it, like a green-boxed heaven.
The soundtrack (by Nino Rota) fits very well into the overall atmosphere of the film.
Unlike most of his colleagues Fellini recorded the scenes without dialogue and resynchronised them later using professional speakers. The actors sometimes only moved their lips without saying anything or recited numerical series.
Cast and Crew
When Fellini began in 1967 with the pre-production work, stars like Danny Kaye, Groucho Marx, Gert Fröbe, Boris Karloff and even Bud Spencer got role offers. But due to certain circumstances they all weren't able to sign.
So Fellini finally filled the two main roles with unknown and almost inexperienced actors only based on agency pictures.
He also signed actors from the road, e.g. a host of a Trattoria in his favorite neighborhood in Rome, employees of a slaughterhouse and gypsies.
"None of them are professional actors; these faces come from my private dreams. I opened a little office in Rome and asked funny-looking people to come in. Did you know Nero had a hang-up on freaks? He surrounded himself with them."
-- Fellini
The Story
The story, which is set before the Christian era, is based on a fragmentary work of fiction by Gaius Petronious, that he has written in Rome during the reign of Nero (in late first century).
The student-heroes Encolpius and Ascyltus fight for the love of their lover-boy Giton. Gitone doesn't mind such treatment and indeed rather enjoys the attention.
Through their journey they wander across the Roman Empire, either participating in orgies, feasts, festivals, murders or abductions.
The film starts with Encolpius standing in front of a graffiti wall and ends (on an uncompleted sentence, just as the manuscript) as the characters of the film take their places in the fragments of a wall painting.
Fellini himselves called his film a "science-fiction film, but one in which we journey to the past rather than to the future."
"I am examining ancient Rome as if this were a documentary about the customs and habits of the Martians."
-- Fellini in an Interview, 1969
Theatre of the Absurd
The film is far away from what we can see in cinemas these days and that really makes it interesting to watch.
It's like a surreal trip, a hallucination and sometimes even a nightmare. It strongly reminds me of grotesque theatre.
It shows us a world with dwarfs and giants, fat people and beanpoles, homosexuals, hermaphrodites and transvestites, some grotesquely painted or costumed.
Fellini has done nothing less than create a new world, a kind of subterranean Oz, a world of magic and superstition, without values, without government, without faith, and almost totally without conscience.
-- Vincent Canby, New York Times 1970
In this world beheadings and amputations, suicides and violent deaths are a daily fare.
During an entertainment near the beginning of the film, a slave's hand is chopped off. Then the bloody stump is equipped with a new hand made of gold. The aristocrats in the audience are amused.
In another scene a woman shouts: "My God, I'm leaving. They just cut off another arm." And so she missed the cannibalism scene...
Favorite Scene
My favorite scene is when a patrician couple frees their slaves and then commit suicide.
It's like after they're freeing themselves from earthly sins and boundaries, they're ready to leave this hellish world to a sphere of higher conciousness.
Interpretations
The characters in the movie, like most of the characters in ancient myth, act according to their natures, without self contemplation or the possibility to change their 'mythical programming'.
On their ongoing journey they are trying to find a way to feel something deep. But they never find it.
Some reviewers hold the opinion that the film might be a metaphor for the hippie culture of the late 60s, because they thought that the hippies had lived for the moment and just followed their sex drive. And so they also did never "get no satisfaction".
It is a surreal epic that, I confidently believe, will outlive all its interpretations.
— Vincent Canby, New York Times 1970
Conclusion
I really enjoyed watching the movie. After nearly 50 years the topics are still relevant.
If you watch todays news, you sometimes get the feeling, that human life in our world also doesn't have much value. We are building walls to try to keep the hellish world with all the refugees of war and poverty outside.
But the real hell is inside of our society, when we don't care, when we act like the characters, that are not able to find a way out of their programming. Like in a never ending drama.
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