Amarcord, which means "I remember," is a severely nostalgic film from Federico Fellini. It is also a movie composed entirely of vignettes that do not seem to be forming into any sort of cohesive whole until late in the film. An apparent lack of narrative force can make the film a difficult one to dip into, but I found that it improves greatly on repeat viewings as we get to know its large cast of characters and its sad, sinister undertones become more apparent. Amarcord follows a year in the life of the people of the Italian village of Rimini. It is the 1930s. Fascism has taken hold and Il Duce is in power.
In watching the film I was immediately struck by its similarity to two nostalgic American movies. It is like A Christmas Story in its structure and its cast of broad, sometimes grotesque, comic characters many of whom are family. Watch any of the dinner scene from Amarcord and then view similar moments in Christmas and you will see that director Jean Shepherd was clearly influenced by Fellini. Amarcord also calls to mind Radio Days, the vignette-filled Woody Allen film about growing up in 1940s Brooklyn. The two are so alike that it is clear Allen was unabashedly emulating Amarcord with his nostalgic look at family and lost youth.
Those two films, however, used an offscreen narrator to tie one disparate moment to the next while Amarcord does not. Fellini's transitions are more jarring and the sequence of events in the film does not necessarily follow any immediately apparent pattern. This will likely be disconcerting to the first time viewer more attuned to the tidy storytelling of most film and television. More than tell a story, Fellini wants to reminisce. He jumps from one vivid memory to the next without the urgency of arriving at a fixed endpoint.
About a third of the way into the film it becomes clear who its main characters will be. All are plagued by great longing. Titta Biondi, a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood, obsessed with the female bodies of Rimini. His father Aurelio the town's lone communist, political stalwart, and a frequently ineffectual patriarch. And Gradisca an aging beauty and the obsession of all the boys and men of Rimini. She expresses a continual aching desire for transcendent romance and seeks it out in films, ceremony, and the pomp and trappings of Fascism. This desire for transcendence cannot be satiated and it continually proves allusive even to the end of the film.
The humor of Amarcord is cruel, usually the pain or humiliation. This recalls the humor of another classic Don Quixote which mines much of its humor from the torture of the addled Alfonso. Nabokov found the book, in a famous series of lectures given at Harvard, to be crude and cruel and wonders what he would make of Fellini's film. In the film, we see townspeople having fun at the expense of the crazed Volpina and the town's blind musician. Much of the cruelty of Amarcord, however, can be seen as a result of fascism as group think takes over and brings man's worse tendencies to the fore.
We see much of the film through the eyes of the teenage Titta who is fascinated by the female posterior and to a lesser extent cleavage. The men of Rimini never grow out of this objectifying behavior, however, and long after the female form even as they overlook the women themselves. The oversexed Volpina is teased and handled by the men of the town. Gradisca is hounded by catcalls wherever she goes and the town's boys direct their sexual longing toward a statue of a mythic naked figure. The film's priest seems to only care if his young male confessors are engaged in onanism. Sex is the constant obsession of the men of Rimini, but it is forever adolescent and an aggressive, one-sided affair.
The film's most memorable scenes follow a day of pageantry for visiting dignitaries. All of Rimini gathers together to praise Il Duce and to put on a show of being good Fascists. They move as a group and work themselves into a fury of loyalty. They act in unison and behave as a hive mind. Even the priesthood and school teachers--who more indoctrinate than educate--collude with the Fascists. The lone dissenter is humiliated after an attempt to show solidarity with a different political cause.
Amarcord from moment to moment feels disjointed and even aloof. As the film closes, though, its elliptical structure reveals itself and seemingly unconnected moments come together. We begin to see Fellini's blueprint and the entire approach seems less scattershot. The film also has a large cast and when viewing the movie a second time each character becomes more distinctive. With Amarcord repeat viewing is a necessity.
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