Satyricon

Fellini Satyricon; historical film / art-film / grotesque, Italy / France, 1969; D: Federico Fellini, S: Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born, Salvo Randone, Magali Noël, Capucine, Alain Cuny

Ancient Rome, 1st century AD, during the reign of emperor Nero. Students Encolpius and Ascyltus are fighting over the affection for teenage boy Gitone. Encolpius saves Gitone from slavery of a bizarre theatre and spends the night with him. An earthquake destroys the catacomb city... Encolpius is observing a museum and later enjoys a feast with the rich Trimalchio who orders his men to torture a poet, Eumolpus, for daring to criticize Trimalchio's poetry as plagiarism... Encolpius, Ascyltus and Gitone end up as slaves on a pirate ship for the amusement of an emperor, but get released when the emperor gets killed in a revolution... Encolpius and Ascyltus kidnap a hermaphrodite from a temple for ransom, but it dies from thirst... Encolpius fights against a man with a mask of Minotaur and gets impotent. He leaves in a ship for Africa after Ascyltos dies.

With his loose adaptation of Petronius' novel "Satyricon", a sort of degenerate version of "Quo Vadis", Federico Fellini probably strived to create a parable about the decadance and spiritual emptiness of the ancient Rome, which subsequently lead to its civilizational collapse, but lost himself entirely in the context by filming one of his weaker films in which he doesn't have a measure for anything, disappointing everyone except his biggest fans who can even find something amazing in the phantasmagorical chaos and megalomanic frenzy. The original text survives only in fragments, with huge gaps of missing text, and thus Fellini decided to present the material in a series of disjointed and dislocated scenes—it is thus not unusual to have a random "hard cut" to a completely different location without any transition or connection. But his didactic of Rome contains too many horrifying nonsense: in the grotesque theatre sequence, one actor farts, while a slave's hand gets cut off with an axe. No explanation or context is given, and thus the disturbing thing is how "lightly" this mutilation is forgotten and not brought up, as the only focus in this sequence seems to be Encolpius trying to get Giton back from the stage. Here and there, some comical moments liven it up, such as the story where a woman decides to starve next to the corpse of her late husband, but then finds new energy with a lover, a nearby soldier who was supposed to watch that the hanged corpse of a criminal shall not be taken away. When other criminals steal the corpse of the criminal from the noose, the widow has a solution: "Better to hang up a dead husband than lose a living lover".

The phantasmagorical tone continues with the scenes where 30 people carry a giant statue of a head, a mass of people bathing nude in nature, a dead whale hanging on a rope from a ship. It works to a certain extent as a rare chronicle of the ordinary civilian lives in ancient Rome, their mentality and habits that seem, as Fellini puts it, as "a science-fiction movie of the past". However, Fellini is even there inconsistent—several episodes were invented by himself, and were not found in Petronius' novel, which thus wrecks the initial concept. One of the most disturbing sequences Fellini added is the one where people bring a man without hands or legs to a hermaphrodite with breasts and a penis who allegedly has powers to heal the sick. Encolpius, Ascyltus and a henchman kidnap the hermaphrodite for ransom, but it dies in a carriage from thirst due to the summer heat. What is the point of this cruel moment? It doesn't play any role later in the story, which is episodic, anyway, so why did Fellini make up this awful subplot in the first place? "Satyricon" has an impressive visual style (the ending with a match cut from the head of Encolpius to his fresco on a wall in the present) and sense for abstract mise-en-scene, working as some sort of a subconscious nightmare, but because of its excessive tendency towards tasteless grotesque, unbearable anxiety and pretentiousness, this episodic plot without a story doesn't have much of a value. Not even the scene where a humiliated wizard takes revenge on a woman creating fire for the whole village from her crotch is neither amusing nor relevant. Fellini's "Amarcord" also has weird characters, strange episodes and grotesque jokes—but it is so genuinely fun. "Satyricon", on the other hand, is a weird mess of a film without fun: it has artistic and historical value, but does anyone truly enjoy in it today?

Grade:+