Federico Fellini
8 1/2

"I understand what you are trying to do. You want to portray the confusion of a man within himself." 

This film is self-analysis and therefore a game between reality, memories, the past, imaginations, fantasies, desires.

The backstory is: after making La Dolce Vita and a short film (Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio) Fellini is at an impasse, after a masterpiece comes the fear of creating something mediocre and the fear above all of having completely exhausted what he had to say, that his creative vein has dried up. Fellini himself had no script ready for the film, he no longer had ideas and was ready to throw in the towel until one day, at a little party at Cinecittà, he had a stroke of genius, the idea: the film would be about a director who has nothing to say, who wanted to make a film but no longer remembers what he wanted to do, getting lost in inner confusion.

Fellini didn't even have a title to give the film, so he named it 8 1/2 because it was shot after 7 films and a short.

The plot unfolds on different and simultaneous narrative planes mixing real life, fantasy, and the past, the auditions, and the film within the film: the events take place in a modern Art Nouveau style spa where Guido (Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini’s alter ego), a famous 43-year-old director (Fellini's actual age at the time) cannot shape his film. The whole entourage puts him under pressure, the producers, the French actress, the assistants: what’s the plot? What will it be about? No one knows, everyone waits hoping he knows what to do, but Guido doesn't even know.

Guido then begins to delve into himself, into his life, into the film he must create, and into the dream woman he seeks (Claudia Cardinale) while reliving his obsessions, his doubts, his passions, the women in his life: Carla the lover (the sweet and voluptuous Sandra Milo) and Luisa the patient and angry wife (the splendid Anouk Aimée), the friend (Rossella Falk) and the distant memories: childhood, child games, the house in Romagna, the Catholic education, and the amorous games of Saraghina.

All these figures, these ghosts, these memories, these desires crowd his soul as the press conference is prepared and journalists throng, waiting to tear him apart with ferocity: Guido feels doomed, he has no time left but as Fellini says "he cannot help but dive deep into the current confusion, confronting all parts of himself and all the characters, ghosts, monsters within and outside of him, to get to accept them, to love them, to assign each their place until unifying them in a creative synthesis representing a new balance": which is nothing other than the psychoanalytic process (Fellini had long since started psychoanalysis). Going through all this, which is what we see in the film, seen through Guido's "I", not according to external logic but according to the logic of the unconscious brings him to an insight, a restructuring: in this baroque, kitsch, and excessive circus dance, he feels life, he feels himself ( I feel like liberated, everything is good, everything has a meaning, everything is true... this confusion is me, who I am and not who I want to be, and it doesn’t scare me anymore... to say the truth of what I don’t know, what I seek, that I haven’t found... only then do I feel alive and can look your faithful eyes without shame): so the film will be made!

The film explicitly showcases Fellini's genius in both figures (the lunar and surreal garden and spa scenes), the perfect choice of actors, and mastery of the scenes (for instance, the final scene where the circus parade externally expresses Guido/Fellini’s fantasy and poetry, having found his art again).

It's difficult to explain why this film is splendid one of the most beautiful, with a modernity and beauty of scenes presented with perfect accuracy and fluidity (the splendid scene in the car, as he thinks, with all his figures rotating around him), with all these external voices, these figures, these women who are merely reflections of the internal voices, the many selves of each of us.

Splendid music by Nino Rota.