Fellini: I'm A Born Liar - Plot

Plot

A camera tracks crosswise alongside a wide, brightly appointed beach, in what appears to be the dead of winter. No bathers are in sight, only a rolling parade of empty cabanas, with a tranquil blue seascape in the distance beyond. The wistful, melancholy music of Nino Rota lends these vistas a dreamy familiarity. We then jump from color to luminous black & white, and a quick glimpse of Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½, in which the monumentally buxom harlot, La Saraghina, is preparing to perform her rumba on the beach for a flock of fugitive schoolboys. It’s the very same beach we were just staring at, but magically denuded of 40 years of succeeding development, and made mythic through the eyes of a master. From this point of departure, Pettigrew juxtaposes archival footage and fresh interviews with Fellini’s collaborators, interspersed with classic clips and the fruits of his own present-day visits to the haunting locales where I Vitelloni (1953), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), Satyricon (1969) and other cinematic wonders first came to life. The goal is to fuse these ingredients thematically, to a degree that may better illuminate Fellini’s conscience and philosophies.

"I am a born liar," the maestro tells us. "For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented." In one way or another, Fellini’s playful habit of honestly admitting falsehood is presented, and tested, as the key to his art, and even his spirituality. The maestro’s boyhood in the Adriatic coastal town of Rimini is conjured through a combination of an unpublished baby picture of Fellini, contemporary footage, and his own spoken reminiscence. Fellini remembers being fascinated, when still a small boy, by the town’s artistic types - bohemian outcasts who were, by turns, dirty, flashy, and inner directed. "A small boy is naturally rebellious," he tells us, of himself. "He’s reacting to the laws, the taboos, the rules laid down by his family, his school. And my generation was faced with so many taboos, those of the Catholic Church, of Fascism."

This reflection is intercut with a behind-the-scenes of Amarcord (1973), Fellini’s intimate epic about small-town life in the Benito Mussolini era. The focus is on the scene, both nightmarish and comedic, in which the hero’s father is obliged by the police to drink castor oil, for no reason other than as a clownish, sadistic exercise of small-time power. Fellini circles the action, prompting the actors, crooning to them, snarling, sometimes obliging them to act directly towards him, as he crouches off-camera. Emphasised in this context is Fellini’s intense discomfort at causing such a scene to be re-enacted, however satiric the energy. He scowls, grits his teeth, and admonishes one actor playing a Blackshirt bully to be more precise, for pity’s sake: "Your partner has been suffering for days because of you. Get it right!"

Fellini’s early manhood and lifelong collaboration with his actress wife, Giulietta Masina, are evoked through a combination of interviews (particularly with Fellini’s boyhood chum Titta Benzi) and clips from 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits. While it is an understandable temptation to think of such scenes as "autobiography", they are counterbalanced by Fellini’s own warnings: "Memory is a most mysterious element, almost indefinable, that links us to things we don’t even remember having lived. It constantly incites us to stay in contact with dimensions, events, and sensations, that we can’t define, but that we know actually happened." After a close look at the overtly fake plastic seascapes of And the Ship Sails On (1983), Italian novelist Italo Calvino observes: "To a psychoanalyst, whether you tell the truth or whether you lie, isn’t very important. Because even lies are interesting, eloquent, revealing, just as much as what is considered truth. I distrust a writer who claims to tell the whole truth about himself, about life, or about the world."

Some of the contradictions in Fellini’s accounts of himself are just plain funny. "I adore actors," he tells us. Cut to Donald Sutherland, star of Fellini's Casanova (1976), who quietly seethes that "in his relations with actors, Federico was dreadful, a martinet, a tyrant". Yet Sutherland is close to a smile as he recalls and then offers an insight that deepens the film’s argument: "Fellini is constantly threatened by his own superficiality, and is constantly running away from it, in the same sense as Orson Welles. Orson Welles created a lie about himself that was in fact the truth, but he knew that it was a lie he’d created - and once everybody believed it, he found it insupportable." Rocking the stability of these persuasive remarks is Roberto Benigni, star of La voce della luna (1990), extolling Fellini’s charm with actors in bright, broad strokes: "He treated me, for the first time in my life, like I was a real actor. Or better - actress! I was in the center, and to everybody he say, 'This is-a my Kim-a Novak.'"

Terence Stamp, who played Toby Dammit in Histoires extraordinaires (1968), remembers that when he asked for a bit of directorial instruction, Fellini glared at him at first as if witnessing something unnatural - a puppet who dared to question its puppeteer. Then, off the top of his head, he offered Stamp a lulu of an "actor’s motivation" for Toby, telling him: "Last-a night you play Macbeth. Then you go to a party. Big-a party. Whiskey. Hashish. Cocaine. A whore-gy! And at this-a whore-gy, you fuck some woman while some black-a man fuck you. Then you are on your way to the airport and someone put big tab LSD under your tongue. Now you're here!" Stamp needed no further preparation. Nevertheless, he was constantly intrigued by Fellini’s love of extreme artifice. When he asked the director why the makeup people had been told to place Toby’s eyebrows at such an unnaturally high angle on his forehead, Fellini replied, "They are question marks. It makes you look like you’re asking a question."

Tullio Pinelli, screenwriter of La strada and La Dolce Vita, and cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno outline the varied, often complex approaches to scripting a Fellini film and lighting it. Noted French producer Toscan du Plantier details the frustration of working with a temperamental director who "needs an enemy" for inspiration. "An artist is a medium," insists Fellini, "a vessel to be filled by fantasy" as painter and long-time intimate, Rinaldo Geleng, evokes the maestro's wild mental states during La dolce vita, 8½ and Casanova. Featured during these interviews are extremely rare behind-the-scenes of La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's Casanova, and City of Women that are, in turn, punctuated by mysterious uncredited appearances by Ennio Flaiano, Alain Cuny, and Nanni Moretti.

As the film moves through its final third, we tour the stagier sets and sample the less formally scripted scenes which characterize Fellini’s later work. These scenes are balanced against the filmmaker’s own latter-day musings in such a way that, even if one tends to resist Fellini’s later films, one is better able to see and understand them on his terms as part of an inevitable, continuous growth on his part. "Faking things, constantly faking!" says Fellini as we observe in detail his skillfully crafted, openly false, studio-built seascapes. "Making a fake sea, a fake meadow, a fake storm. All this faking, this representation - probably unconsciously - is merely a repetition of a kind of magic ritual."

After a clip from 8½ in which a sleepless Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) worries that his latest film will capsize, owing to his own shortcomings - "What if it’s the end," he asks himself, "of a big fat liar without talent or genius?"- Fellini reflects that "doubt" is also a vital part of the creative process. "Fear is a feeling you have to cultivate. A man cannot do without being afraid. A fearless man is, I think, a fool. Fear is inseparable from being human." Fear of death motivated Fellini to abandon, sometime around 1966, a poetic film about the afterlife called The Voyage of G. Mastorna. Terence Stamp encouraged Fellini to make the film anyway: "'You think if you make this film, you will die,'" he recalls telling the maestro. "'And you will! But not in the way you think. You’ll be reborn.'" Fellini resisted the advice. And yet, Mastorna itself was reborn, again and again as he saw it, in all his later work. "The most intimate and secret part of that film has nourished and found its way into every film I made later," he reflects. "Like the wreck of a ship that from the floor of the ocean continues to send radioactive signals." We are then shown footage of Mastroianni with Giulietta Masina on the set of City of Women and Mastroianni during a screen test for the ill-fated Mastorna.

Such ruminations set the tone for the film’s close in which Fellini reflects (as he approaches his own death in 1993) on the fleeting properties of life in general and the unforeseen, dream-like career which became his life. "I think it is a necessity," he says of the creative process, alluding not just to filmmaking but to the imaginative ways in which we each navigate our lives. "An interpretation... Which protects, consoles and reassures. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to instill in mankind the need to have a religious feeling. That’s what any kind of art expresses."

The film ends full circle at the seascape where it began except that, now, the remnant of an abandoned camera-track is aimed straight into the sea. On the ambiguity of this final image, critic F. X. Feeney wrote: "Is this substitution of a real sea for the imaginary ones we’ve been sailing for the past hour and forty minutes a critique, a refutation of Fellini’s beloved fakery? Or is it a validation - an invitation to enter the reality at which those fancies were ultimately aimed? In keeping with the maestro's elusive art, the image is a deliberate paradox."