Every day brings a drama. Every summer the family liberates Uncle Teo from the local asylum for a picnic in the country, and this year while they are distracted he climbs a tree and refuses to come down, moaning “I want a woman!” like a lovesick bull. He throws apples at those who try to climb up to him, and finally the family sends to the asylum for help, and a midget nun arrives to order Teo down. This nun wears a headdress so exaggerated we never see her face, and form an instant opinion that she is, in fact, a man.
The arrival of a provincial fascist leads to an absurd public ceremony, all of the fascists trotting from the train station to the public square, where a papier-mache Mussolini looks like a comic bulldog. The local youth go through gymnastics exercises no doubt connected to national security. We also glimpse their education, in a hilarious montage of classes in the local school, one interrupted by the most novel and ingenious delivery of urine that can possibly be imagined.
There is a poetic and melancholy side, too, as when fog blankets the town and the characters seek softly for their bearings, and when the great liner Rex passes offshore and the townspeople all row out in their boats to watch it pass (it is as artificial as the “waves” the boats ride on, suggesting how much the national image depends on illusion). Local imaginations are inflamed by what must go on at the Grand Hotel, which none of the locals can afford to step foot in, although Gradisca, their heroine, figures in a popular legend there -- and so does the rummy-dummy, when a Sultan’s harem lets down their rope ladders for him. Gradisca is their carnal fantasy, their symbol of hope, their good-hearted friend. She also supplies an example of the way Fellini’s films become his parallel autobiography; Gradisca is virtually the same character, in appearance and behavior, as Carla (Sandra Milo), Marcello’s mistress in “8 1/2.”
The film’s most beautiful scene involves the snowfall and the peacock feathers. The snow is plowed into impossibly tall walls to make a maze between which the boys and Gradisca have a snowball fight. The saddest scene, at the beach, is Gradisca’s wedding to a slick fascist leader; the marriage is of their hopes and their doom. She pulls away from her husband to throw her bride’s bouquet, but there is no one to catch it.
The film is saturated with Fellini’s affection for these people, whose hopes are so transparent they can see through their own into another’s. All of the Fellini visual trademarks are here, including the half-finished scaffold that mediates between heaven and earth, and the grotesque faces of the extras, and the parades and processions, and always the Nino Rota music (and his arrangements of standards, especially “Stormy Weather”). Fellini shoots in color, and makes special use of the reds and whites of Gradisca’s outfits. He is careful to stay mostly in mid- and long-shot, the correct distance for comedy, and uses closeup mostly for intense longing.
His film seems almost to flow from the camera, as anecdotes will flow from one who has told them often and knows they work. If there is a bittersweet undertone, perhaps it is because Fellini suspected the film business was changing and his funding and access would never again be the same; this was the last of his films made for no better reason than Fellini wanted to make it.
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