Little Italy

Fellini pictures the entrapment of small town life

Federico Fellini is often remembered as cinema’s outrageous free spirit. The term “Felliniesque” conjures up the carnivalesque extremes of master-works like 8 1/2 and Satyricon. But Felliniesque could just as easily describe another consistent hallmark of the director’s work: exquisitely tender, understated films like Nights of Cabiria and La Strada.

Schooled in the Italian neorealism of Roberto Rossellini (with whom he penned Open City), Fellini could depict personal hardship with the best of the neorealists. Just as often, though, he diverged from that path into a more enchanted, bittersweet vision of his characters. Fellini was a masterful architect of the human soul. His wistful films often treated the search for freedom and meaning on a life path lined with both marvels and sadness.

Fellini’s 1953 masterpiece I Vitelloni illustrates the director’s typical command of human frailty in this portrait of the idle offspring of the Italian middle class. The title translates as “big slabs of veal,” an apt analogy for the five immature, spoiled, middle-class twenty-somethings at the center of the drama who await the “slaughter” of real life.

Though eternal adolescence can seem like a more contemporary invention, I Vitelloni assures us that able, jobless young men have been hugging the last days of boyhood for an eternity.

The film is set in the Adriatic seaside town of Rimini, where Fellini also grew up. The setting neatly conveys the larger themes of the film — of the sunny summer days of youth transformed into the gray, dismal ones of encroaching adulthood.

The film opens as the buzz and excitement of summer changes, in an instant, to the bitter reality of tourist season’s end. On the eve that the town crowns its local beauty queen, Miss Mermaid, violent storms blow. The thunderstorm is prophetic: Miss Mermaid Sandra (Elenora Ruffo) is in the family way and the cad responsible, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), is hotfooting it out of town.

Entrapment defines the lives of I Vitelloni’s five friends — Fausto, Leopoldo, Riccardo, Alberto and Moraldo — who roam Rimini’s streets in idle recreation, play pool and wait for the purgative release of Carnival, which becomes a stand-in for an unlived fantasy life. As the seasons slowly pass, Fellini gives the physical sensation of how easily time can get away from you, as an imagined future transforms into the present you’re stuck with.

Though his father forces Fausto to stay in Rimini and marry Sandra, that doesn’t put an end to his roving eye and tomcatting ways. Fausto missed his chance to escape the gravitational pull of the town, but skirt-chases freedom and perpetual youth in other ways.

His friends have their dreams, too. Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste) is the most ambitious among them. An amateur playwright, Leopoldo manages to interest a once-famous actor (Achille Majeroni) in his play, until the older actor suggests an eerie turn down a dark road. As much as the world outside the town beckons, it also suggests corruption and dangers of its own.

Observing all of the micro and macro changes in his friends’ lives, the taciturn Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi) becomes a stand-in for Fellini himself, and the artist as witness to humanity’s ebb and flow.

And so it is with a mixture of regret and also relief that the least expected character ends up leaving town. In one of the most unforgettable shots in film history, a train bearing one of the boys out of town magically passes by the town’s residents, sleeping in their beds. Their eyes are blissfully closed, at least for a while, to the world outside.

The moment crystallizes the various ways Fellini could imagine escape — literally, as the figure on the train leaving Rimini for Rome.

But Fellini was also an artist who conveyed how dreams could be, for many, escape enough.