Movie Review: 8 ½

What most interests people? Other people, for one. Sex, violence, science, war, religion, history, and politics, for another. All of this is interesting. But nothing interests people quite as much as themselves. And so we come to 8 ½, a movie about a popular Italian film director given to intellectual flights of fancy on-screen and womanizing in his private life. 8 ½ was directed in 1963 by Federico Fellini, a popular Italian film director known for those same habits. It has been called alternatively an exercise in stylistic vanity and one of the best films ever made. The pertinent question perhaps is: why can’t it be both?

Whatever else the film may be, it is Fellini down to its bones. All of the director’s trademarks are here. There are dance sequence featuring exotic Italian beauties set to swinging salsa beats. The backgrounds of shots are as busy with actors moving in and out of frame as are the foregrounds, and the movie ends with the entirety of the very large cast joining hands and running around in a circle while a five-member brass band plays in the center. Fellini loved parades. Fellini loved the circus, and many of his best films have the same kind of chaotic energy to them. 8 ½ has a plot involving director Guido Anselmi’s attempt to come up with ideas on the fly for a film that technically is already in production, but the movie is at its best when its inside Guido’s head, following him on whatever indulgent fantasy currently has his attention. The movie weaves in and out of reality and fantasy so often that the viewer can be forgiven for not always knowing what is real and what is imagined, but this barely-there structure is exactly where Fellini is most at home. It allows for his ideas to breathe and for his images to emerge without constraint. The movie is not so much a story about Guido as a rumination on him and the people surrounding him.

But how vivid those ruminations are, and what interesting company he keeps. There are many characters, and while none besides Guido gets much attention, they all splash onto screen long enough to make an impression. There is Guido’s on-edge producer, desperate for a script, an idea, anything to appease the investors. There is a quibbling writer, forever criticizing Guido for his lack of focus and originality. To Fellini, making a movie is a maddening dance that saps the spirit and imagination. It is no wonder that Guido retreats into his fantasies, which are uniformly colorful and entertaining and far more easy to handle than his real life.

And then there are the multitude of women circling Guido’s star: his long-suffering wife, his self-deluding mistress, his ethereal muse. In a movie this unbound by any traditional structure, even figures from Guido’s past reach out to him. His devoutly Catholic mother disapproves of him from out of his childhood, and in one memorable sequence a young Guido and his schoolmates visit a full-bodied prostitute who lives on the beach, and she dances for them. Guido cares for all of these women but is incapable of committing to any of them. In what is arguably the movie’s best and certainly one of its most entertaining scenes, Guido imagines that he lives in a harem with all of his women, past and present, and that they give him whatever he needs. But even here reality intrudes. The women revolt, indignant over their split shares of affection, and Guido has to fend them off like a circus trainer does a pack of hungry lions. The sequence is absurd and funny and desperate and strangely moving. It is in brief what the movie tries and so often succeeds to be.

While in production, the working title for 8 ½ was The Beautiful Confusion. The film lives up to it. In the later years of his career, many criticized Fellini as his movies veered into self-indulgence, but 8 ½ proves that the director was fully capable of marrying stylistic excess with a beating heart. Guido has problems. He’s immature, he doesn’t know what he wants, and he prefers fantasy to reality. He has a beautiful brain, though. And he learns. Furthermore, he does it with style.