Federico Fellini
Satyricon

LA RECENSIONE

The art of the novel from ancient times has come to us immensely fragmented. Very little has survived through the centuries, and Petronius' "Satyricon" is one of the few examples. Unfortunately, this too has reached us in a mutilated form: the novel begins with the two protagonists in trouble without knowing why, proceeds through a thousand other adventures, most often unrelated and difficult to understand, and the ending... it is not clear how it ends. The "missing pieces" are at the beginning, middle, and end, and despite numerous studies, we are not even given to know how long or numerous they could have been. This alone would make the "Satyricon" a work of immense fascination, but a book of this kind in the hands of the greatest dreamer of all time, well, becomes something incredible.

Federico Fellini recounted that he took up the "Satyricon" again while recovering from a surgical operation: and what attracted him most was not the story, but the innumerable points of suspension, indicating missing elements, between one episode and another... and so suddenly he felt that "an immense dreamlike galaxy, set in darkness, appeared before his eyes, coming to us floating and sparkling." Fellini erases the historical truth of the classical era's representation, and by maintaining only the "skeleton" of Petronius' plot, fills all the missing episodes with images and events born from his volcanic imagination. Encolpius (Martin Potter) recounts the adventures experienced while pursuing the beloved youth Gitone (Max Born) in the company of his friend Ascyltos (Hiram Keller). Ascyltos partakes in the hallucinating banquet of the wealthy freedman Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli). Later, we find the three protagonists as prisoners of the pirate Lichas, on a ship, and after Lichas is killed, Encolpius and Ascyltos wander, encountering the suicide of two patricians (reminiscent of the intellectual’s suicide in "La Dolce Vita"), a hermaphrodite, a minotaur. Accused of impiety by the god Priapus, Encolpius undergoes a bizarre erotic ritual to regain his lost virility. And much more.

If already in the plot the absolute freedom from the classical text chosen by the director is apparent, this is even more evident in the staging, overflowing, exaggerated in every imaginable sense, baroque. Fellini's Rome is made up of incredible, enormous implausible architectures, colorful, surreal. The totally a-historical, Byzantine-psychedelic costumes worn by the actors leave one speechless, and as always, those incredible faces that Fellini knew how to choose even for the last extras. The whole film is dominated by a continuous hiss of the wind, desolation, and immense empty spaces: a sense of decadent, deathly fascination. What the director himself describes feeling not in front of Greek statues, but their amputated arms, their broken noses. This indescribable nostalgia for a world that never existed, but was only dreamed of.

Judging Fellini's "Satyricon" is almost impossible. For many, it is one of the director's least successful works, almost an absolutely extreme and hallucinatory vision of "La Dolce Vita". Nonetheless, it remains a captivating and enchanting work: like being in the arms of the Venus de Milo, to quote Television.