Federico Fellini
Amarcord

Unhappy is the country that needs heroes, said the wise man. Paraphrasing him, we could say that unhappy is the cinema that needs heroes.

The hero of Italian cinema of the last century has been, according to most references, Federico Fellini from Rimini, a dreamer and filmmaker loved almost everywhere, especially overseas, earning Oscars in abundance, as well as the creation of a specific adjective: "fellinesque", symbolizing a rhapsodic, fleeting, self-indulgent, sometimes grotesque aesthetic.

I don't mind Fellini, but I sometimes find his cinema too artificial, and, above all, too self-referential, a continuous representation of his hypertrophic ego through the various characters that compose his personal comedy.

Personally, I am fond of a less artistic but more didactic cinema, if I may say so, where the plot, acting, and message matter: thus of the Italian cinema of the 20th century, I particularly save De Sica, Germi, Monicelli, Risi, Salce, and Comencini, with some reservations for Antonioni and many for Fellini himself. Then there would be a separate discussion for Ferreri. In any case, to avoid controversies, if a Fellini were to be born today, we'd be kissing our elbows, as we say around here.

All this introduction for a brief comment on the acclaimed 'Amarcord', a partially autobiographical film, awarded with an Oscar and entered the collective imagination thanks to scenes such as the nighttime passage of the Rex, Ingrassia's "I want a woman", the Mussolini parade, the sensuality of Gradisca, and the rather buxom tobacconist. If you want, it's a film that enters the small history of Italian cinema for the significant debut of the good Alvaro Vitali, but this, ça va sans dire, is quite another story.

It's the Fellini film I like the most, precisely because the scenes, and the dreamlike aspect that so pervades his feature films, are here functional to a proper narrative, a reflection on the fleeting nature of time, on an individual's past and, if you will, on the past and the small twentieth-century mythology of our country.

What I don't like about 'Amarcord' is perhaps the smug, affectionate, and indulgent sketch towards our country, almost accepting its limits supinely, the opportunism, the tendency to bend without breaking, the sycophancy towards the powerful of the moment, the intellectual prostitution, even before the physical one (perhaps the lesser evil). There is not in him that critical detachment, that ferocity that instead emerges in the less acclaimed Risi and Monicelli, as well as in certain Salce's cinema.

I suspend all judgment and grant a 3/5 of (relative) esteem.