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Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), re-released in a new print for its 50th anniversary, makes the crop of prestige fall films seem even punier by comparison. More than that, it is a reminder. Forget for a moment that right now the most it can give us is translucent taffy like Cinema Paradiso and Malena -- there was a time when Italian film was synonymous with challenging, sensuously intellectual moviegoing splendor. So much breathtaking talent: the abstracting ennui of Antonioni, the implicating analysis of Rossellini, the decaying lushness of Visconti, the politicized sensuality of Bertolucci. And check it out -- I haven't even touched on Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francesco Rosi, Ermanno Olmi, Marco Bellochio or the Taviani brothers yet. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, only Ingmar Bergman in Sweden and the Nouvelle Vague guys over in France could rival them in setting ablaze the imaginations of movie buffs. Of the Mediterranean auteurs, Fellini (1920-1993) was possibly the most popular and accessible with audiences. The world he created and celebrated in his films was recognized as "Fellinesque" way before it was hip to come up with such cute terms -- emotional, noisy, mercurial, cheerfully grotesque and chaotic, always swirling around the three- ring circus of life. No matter what the subjects ostensibly were, the pictures inevitably were about Fellini himself, the jostling of his coarse naiveté and his joyous megalomania. It's no secret why so many other directors adore La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2 -- like Bergman, Fellini used the camera in the first-person. The confessional aspect of the director runs through his entire career, but it first came fully to the fore in I Vitelloni, his third feature. The title (which translates to something like "the overgrown calves") refers to the four characters, twentysomething layabouts muddling through life in an uneventful Italian village. There's the ladies' man (Franco Fabrizi), who, afraid that his marriage will jeopardize his lothario status with the rest of the gang, keeps on chasing skirts; the aspiring playwright (Leopoldo Trieste) who dreams of making it big; the joker (Alberto Sordi) whose hulking body is matched by his blubbering emotionalism; and the filmmaker's stand-in (Franco Interlenghi), quietly observant, sensitive and increasingly restless. There really is no "plot" -- Fabrizi's dutiful young wife, fed up with his philandering, runs off at one point, but I Vitelloni rather takes as its shape the unrushed observation of the characters' lives. Nostalgia is the dominant mood, yet with far more complexities than that usually facile term implies: like the frequently misunderstood It's a Wonderful Life, the movie sees the nurturing warmth as well as the stifling complacency of family and small-town life. The "calves," far from indulgent memories, are sharp studies in the degradation of dreams by immaturity, milieu, machismo, and laziness. (Claude Chabrol would achieve a similar, much more acidic portrayal a few years later, switching genders, in Les Bonnes Femmes.) And yet, while exposing and satirizing his characters' limitations, Fellini's eye is free of meanness or cynicism -- he's as attuned to the emotional subtleties of a bunch of guys standing around playing pool as to a young man's painful need to sever his roots and expand his horizons. The picture is early Fellini, much closer to the fond satire of Variety Lights and The White Sheik than to the raucous glitter of La Dolce Vita and Juliet of the Spirits. Despite its share of set pieces (including a carnival sequence marvelously attuned to Nino Rota's shimmering score), it is quieter and simpler than what people normally associate with the maestro. Faced with his increasingly challenging late work, many critics would gaze back nostalgically at the supposedly lost innocence of the I Vitelloni period -- a myopic notion that obscures the fact that the film is more of a beginning than an end.
Martin Scorsese has gone on record citing the film as one of the main influences on his 1973 breakthrough Mean
Streets, though its impression can be spotted just as clearly in American Graffiti, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Diner
and Swingers. Seeing it in late 2003 is to be reminded that, five decades later and an ocean apart, things aren't that
different among wolf packs. The foolishness, the braggadocio, the touching male pride are still ample -- what's in short
supply today is a fond sensitivity like Fellini's to prod them, delicately but cuttingly.
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