Day 4: Amarcord (1973)
Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord” is a coming of age tale at its simplest and a tableaux of small town life at its most complex. With a touch of truth and a lot of calculated silliness, Fellini weaves his story more in small anecdotes then anything else- each centered around one or two members of the town, while the emotional core of the film lies with a single teenage boy, who many critics believe represents Fellini in his youth, though the director, who is famous for his fibs, denies such a claim.
“Amarcord” gives the audience the all around “experience” of living in the fictional seaside town of “Borgo” for an entire year. As the seasons slowly change, we watch the townspeople go about their lives and traditions, while Titta, a teenage boy, connects with three particular woman- his ever exhausted mother, who he learns to understand, Gradisca, a beautiful older woman he wants to love, and the local tobacconist, whose large bosom is the object of lust for Titta and his cohorts. What transpires in that single year is Titta struggling to understand what it takes to grow up in a town that hardly ever changes.
What Fellini offers his audience with “Amarcord” is a slice of reality, but distorted in the same way our memories work, making everything far more dramatic and vivid then it really ever was. With simple aesthetic choices, the mundane becomed the beautiful, the absurd, or even the sexually charged. For example, at the very beginning of the picture, the whole town joins together to celebrate the coming of spring and, while everyone else wears the duller grays and blue of winter, Gradisca, Titta’s muse, appears in a radiant red dress, outshining all around her and making it easy for us to understand the adolescence’s lovelorn obsession.
In another quite funny scene, Titta reminisces about his moments of lust- thinking back to a time he ogled a group of fat-bottomed peasant women as they road past him on their bicycles. Here Fellini fills the screen with each woman’s enormous rear, sticking them so far into the camera that you’re relieved the film isn’t in 3D. But it’s in this absurdity that we can relate as we have all thought back to moments and distorted proportions and circumstances to our preferred likings.
“Amarcord” also holds an interesting political angle. With its story taking place in 1930′s Italy, many of the townspeople side with the Fascists and, at one point in the story, hold a massive rally to welcome one of their high ranking officials. What becomes quickly apparent is how lavish and idiotic they all look goose-stepping down the street- the once powerful party now reduced to clowns as the film’s “memory” interprets them post WWII. In fact, I would go as far to say that this is one of the best comical representations of a political party since Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator.”
Throughout the film, I couldn’t help but also make comparisons to Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” an American play concerning the everyday occurrences in the small town of Grovers Corners, New Hampshire. Both artistic works deals with the concepts of love, death, and family through an observer’s point of view but, while Wilder’s play tends to land on the more melancholy aspects, “Amarcord” revels in the life each brings to those who experience them and the absurdity that may follow.
Probably the best example of what makes each so similar yet so different from one another is the use of a narrator. While “Our Town” uses narration to anchor its story and give the audience a strong understanding of the small East coast setting, “Amarcord” makes their’s a buffoon of a historian, blabbering to the audience until someone in his town either yells for his silence or throws something at his head.
“Amarcord,” by directing extraordinaire Federico Fellini’s, is a treat to behold- a story brimming with sweetness and subtle depth that gives an honest portrayal of youth and small town living the same way we remember our own past- vividly yet ever so absurdly construed.
To learn more about “Amarcord,” check out Criterion’s page here.
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