by Pedro Silva (Camolas)
Mankind has always struggled to transform into words every expression of the human soul. In Portugal we imagined a word, saudade, to define an enigmatic yearning of the heart, a word to express a feeling so connected with our history that is impossible to translate it into any other language. In a similar way Fellini had to find his own neologism. Supposedly Amarcord simply means “I remember”, but we know Fellini was a great liar. I’ll go with the ones that presume Amarcord means the way he remembers the past, whether the memories are true or fake.
Amarcord, the film, is a recollection of those kind of surreal childhood memoirs, delivered as a guided tour through a year in the life of the town of Rimni, from one spring to the next. The cinema of Fellini is always autobiographical in one way of another, degenerated bits of his life and his fantasies. Such courageous personal expression, rarer in cinema than in literature, contributed to his major achievement, he made himself an adjective, “Felliniesque”. The old dictionaries did not have enough words for his genius.
“… and in the end, it’s all about sex!” In a very Freudian approach that is how an old friend use to end our late night adolescent dissertations, no matter what the subject we were on. Fellini feels the same way. Small-town life and adolescent sexuality were already portrayed in Il Vitelloni. Sex can’t be absent or hidden even in a childhood tale, Rimni is filled with muses that inhabit the fantasies of youngsters and adults, offering us an amusing quantity of big curvy butts and outsized breasts. The men’s minds diverge from the sexual repression religion tries to impose. (more…)
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