I Vitelloni (1953)
Directed by Federico Fellini
Five young men dream of success as they drift lazily through life in a small Italian village. Fausto, the group's leader, is a womanizer; Riccardo craves fame; Alberto is a hopeless dreamer; Moraldo fantasizes about life in the city; and Leopoldo is an aspiring playwright. As Fausto chases a string of women, to the horror of his pregnant wife, the other four blunder their way from one uneventful experience to the next.
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What critics compared I Vitelloni to
Fawcett’s final trip, in particular, is perhaps the purest stretch of visual seduction in Gray’s filmography, beginning with the train taking father and son to the edge of wilderness, intercut with brief views of the homefront à la the conclusion of Fellini’s I vitelloni (1953), and moving to the weird ravishment of the torchlit ceremony that precedes our protagonist’s final disappearance.
This could just be my film-addled brain doing the talking, but I nevertheless suspect he finds deep meaning in these branches, perhaps evidenced best by a reference to Fellini’s I Vitelloni so specific as to jolt me out of my seat a bit.
A coming-of-age tale featuring an interconnected, if not incestuous group of young, creative people trying to make their mark, the film will remind arthouse veterans of Fellini’s “I Vitelloni,” a 1953 semi-autobiographical, archetypal, young-male-coming-of-age film about a half-dozen developmentally arrested, small-town Italian layabouts in search of adulthood.
It’s the Italy of Cinzano posters and Marcello Mastroianni (a photo of whom is glimpsed as a kind of talisman at one point), of Fellini movies (“I Vitelloni” especially) and Nino Rota scores and, above all, of Vespa scooters, one of which becomes the object of the two young fish-friends’ shared dreams of escape.
For all its R-rated talk about porn and genitalia, Superbad is part of an honorable ah-when-we-were-young tradition encompassing Richard Linklater�s Dazed and Confused, George Lucas� American Graffiti, Rob Reiner�s Stand by Me, and the granddaddy of them all, Fellini�s I Vitelloni (1953).
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Autobiographical films are normally, if not always, made toward the beginning of directors’ careers — I Vitelloni, The 400 Blows, American Graffiti, Platoon, Almost Famous, et al — so perhaps it’s simply the passage of time that encouraged Cuaron, who’s now 56 and presumably mid-career, to decide that his own childhood’s inner world would be less dramatically compelling onscreen than the lives of others in his immediate orbit.
This new production combines the free form and make-believe splendor of those two films with the comic, bittersweet feeling for character and narrative we remember from some of his best films of the nineteen-fifties—"Variety Lights," "The White Sheik," "I Vitelloni" and "Nights of Cabiria."
"Amarcord" is in striking contrast to the also semi-autobiographical "I Vitelloni" (1953).
Considering that his next major project was La Strada , all cineastes are greatly indebted to this early highly autobiographical film that bookends well with Amarcord .