IL BIDONE (Federico Fellini, 1955)

In The Swindle, one of Federico Fellini’s best films, Augusto fleeces peasants. The con man ends up alone on a hillside, beaten in every possible sense, after concealing money from accomplices that he intended to give his teenaged daughter so she could go to college and realize her dream of becoming a teacher. Augusto (Broderick Crawford, wonderful) has no dreams of his own.
     His “original” accomplices, who abandoned him a year or two earlier, include Carlo, who is called Picasso because he paints; Carlo’s wife, Iris, seems to want him to paint more than he wants to, perhaps to bring him back to an original desire of his that reflects the man she fell in love with. But it is principally fear that motivates the boy to quit his criminal connection to Augusto: fear that Iris will leave him, taking with her the light of his life, Silvana, their young daughter. Roberto, the other accomplice, dreams of becoming the Italian Johnnie Ray, the U.S. entertainer popular in the fifties for crybaby wailing intended to overcome deafness when he sang. Roberto’s risking exposure by an application of his light fingers at a New Year’s party suggests another facet of his identification with Ray: Roberto also may be a closeted homosexual.
     Augusto is sufficiently old that these “original” accomplices are themselves replacements.
     Tonally, this is perhaps Fellini’s most agile and complex accomplishment. Whether Augusto is bilking the poor posing as a monsignor or a housing commissioner, Fellini takes pains to aim ridicule at the Church, and the superstitious devotion it encourages, and postwar bureaucracy, not the poor. Fellini’s ambivalence toward Iris (Giulietta Masina, his wife) may reflect pressures on him to hew to neorealismo!
     The film hauntingly crosses its Fellinidom predecessor, La strada (1954), at least thrice.

ROMA (Federico Fellini, 1972)

An inspiration for Woody Allen’s sweepingly nostalgic, hilarious Radio Days (1987), Federico Fellini’s Roma begins objectively, with Fellini’s voiceover intruding on a patently artificial set, and proceeds to vignettes from his childhood in Rimini, which includes his introduction to Rome. Dictator Mussolini still runs Italy when Fellini, now 18, visits Rome, staying at a bizarre boardinghouse in the early 1930s. The film fuses, then, objectivity and subjectivity, Rome and the Rome of Fellini’s mind, reality and reverie.
     At night a teeming outdoor eatery finds the boy experiencing—an older Fellini remembering—a profusion of sights and sounds (and smells) that puts one in mind of the explosive portrait of London, likewise including grotesque elements, during the St. Bartholomew’s Fair in William Wordsworth’s autobiographical The Prelude. “In Rome we say,” one of the horde at the same table says to the stranger, “everything you eat turns to shit.” Later, in long-shot, a flock of sheep is led across an otherwise deserted city square. The camera approaches a solitary streetside prostitute anxiously waiting for a trick to appear. We jump ahead to present-day Rome in rainy daylight, where a pair of prostitutes—actors—are being filmed. Of course, the previous lone prostitute also was an actress in a film—the one we’re watching. It’s night and still raining, and the film crew is still at work. The traffic stall in front of the Coliseum: Is it real or staged? Next day, young people ask Fellini about the film he is shooting: Is the interview real or staged?
     Extraordinary passages follow, including a haunting journey through corridors of the Rome subways suggesting an archaeological descent into the unconscious. An uproariously funny ecclesiastical fashion show brings to fruition the gag of Anita Ekberg’s priestly attire in La dolce vita (1959).

AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2003)

Written by Iran’s Mohsen Makhmalbaf and daughter Samira, Panj é asr is a compassionate film about post-Taliban Afghanistan that appreciates both religious elders and the young who yearn for self-determination, and a visionary film, a circular “road picture” that keeps returning to the school where girls are encouraged to think about national affairs and how they may contribute to their country’s forward journey, and not just about housework and raising children. Samira Makhmalbaf was in her mid-twenties when she made this film; Nogreh, her protagonist, is three years younger.
     Inspired by the example of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, Nogreh dreams of someday being Afghanistan’s president; but she cannot share this dream with her father, nor lift the veil of her burqa, nor wear her high-heeled shoes, in front of him. Nor may her dream survive the reactionary social and cultural forces arrayed against it.
     Leylomah, Nogreh’s sister-in-law, and her sick baby have been abandoned by their husband and father, Nogreh’s brother: an illustration of misguided male prerogatives. Leylomah has run out of milk and options, but Makhmalbaf keeps symbolism simmering rather than allowing it to take over and abstract the pain of ordinary human lives. Nogreh could be Leylomah if she loses her grasp on her progressive dream. The search for Leylomah’s spouse is part of the movie’s “road” aspect.
     Assisted by her superb cinematographer, Ebrahim Ghafuri, creates exceptionally hard-edged images that appear to have little space for dreams. The film’s bravura opening shows Nogreh stealing to the outdoor school by passing through enveloping structures of darkness; her walk back home, also towards the camera, finds her face darkened as well.
     By stark contrast, shot from behind, the pupils at school, in long-shot a field of white head scarves, encapsulate some progress, hope.

WELCOME TO L.A. (Alan Rudolph, 1976)

Robert Altman protégé Alan Rudolph’s deeply affecting noirish comic rondelay about loneliness and musical beds in Los Angeles, “the city of the one-night stands,” surveys to devastating effect heavily tread-upon hopes, desire, vulnerability. At the center of the film is Carroll Barber, beautifully played by Keith Carradine, who has returned to L.A. after a three years’ absence to visit his millionaire father, a businessman, and to write songs for Eric Wood, who is recording them for an album. Wood is played by Richard Baskin, the real composer/lyricist of the moody contemporary folksy blues that gorgeously punctuate the film’s soundtrack—this, a piece of the self-reflective mosaic of sexual betrayals that zigs and zags Altmaniacally among a wealth of interesting, diverse characters.
     Indeed, mirrors throughout fragment characters visually; at one point, five images of one character appear in a single frame. A supernally clean, clear mirror generates a confrontation between Susan Moore, Carroll’s agent and former lover (he has moved on; she can’t), and her own image that prefaces her freefall into insanity, signaled by her looking at us and laughing. Viveca Lindfors is brilliant in her portrait of dead-end erotic obsession. At the tail end of a number of other scenes, one character or another also fleetingly looks at us. This is another of Rudolph’s methods for suggesting the fracture of a personality. Moreover, we are reminded of the freeze frame that concludes François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), where a teenager who has fled from a juvenile detention center looks directly at us who so want to help him but cannot traverse the boundary between reality and cinema to do so. Neither can we assist Rudolph’s poignant characters.
     Highlight: A man is suddenly overwhelmed by the weight of the adultery he contemplates committing.

WETHERBY (David Hare, 1985)

Playwright David Hare’s first film as director, in this case from his original script (in the shadow of Pinter), is a shattering thing to return to after twenty years. Moreover, Hare may have given the greatest English-language film actress of the past half-century, Vanessa Redgrave, her greatest role (best actress, National Society of Film Critics): Jean Travers, the persevering schoolteacher whose “fake cheerfulness” echoes that of Prime Minister Thatcher, and who harbors some envy for the pupil of hers who runs away—from Wetherby, the small town in which nothing happens and education seems pointless.
     The spouse of Jean’s closest friend says this about Thatcher, metaphors for whom the film conjures: “She’s taking some terrible revenge for something, and now the whole country is suffering.” (We U.S. Americans during the fake presidency of a likely insane George W. Bush can surely relate.) This gentleman also offers this counsel: “If you’re frightened by loneliness, never get married.”
     Jean herself is terribly lonely and haunted by the past. Years ago the boy she loved was murdered while in the service. Now another boy, 25-year-old John Morgan, a graduate student, has entered her life, conning his way into her dinner party and sending her defenses into overdrive by privately expressing their kinship of loneliness, which for several reasons she is driven to deny. The next day Morgan brings her two pheasants, she invites him in, he confesses he knew no one else at dinner the night before and then blows out his brains at Jean’s kitchen table. The police investigator, a former lover of Jean’s, has an ax to grind and his own loneliness.
     Hare weaves a fascinating fabric of past and present; some juxtapositions of different time elements startle, illuminate.
     Did Wetherby influence Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003)?