Federico Fellini's Roma (1972) is for some, one of his more 'difficult' films. It is a film made by a director in his sixth decade and, therefore, at the age when a significant minority of men desert their wives and off-spring to take up with a younger model - in a convenient town flat - in order to re-assert their virility before the onset of prostate complications. Fellini did not do that. He made Roma.
Roma, while bearing all the hallmarks of the Fellini language of neo-realism - satire, luxuriance of imagery, the surreal, the baroque and a John Galliano-style fantasy procession of haute couture whore-noviciates - is rooted in a lamenting, romantic nostalgia. A coda for a post-war Rome that had ceased to exist in the years following his initial arrival there as a child from Adriatic Rimini. It is an arrivederci to the 1960s and lays the runway carpet for the coming of the more uncertain, 'gender-confusion' age of the 1970s. In point of fact, the only people who profited by that decade - apart from Elton John and prog-rock musicians who amplified finger-cymbals to an audience of thousands - were effete, high street unisex hairdressers who worked on their toes while providing lavish compliments.
This poster image in its deliberately crude black and orange pantone features not one of the film's main characters but instead an uncredited actress whose celluloid appearance lasts less than thirty seconds. Anna Maria Pescatori. But those seconds in which she imprints the screen with her conviction, defiance and weltzschmerz as a prositute on the Via Appia is electrifying. Bella bruta straordinaria. She is the Roma of the film and represents the defiled Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, Wolf-mother to Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of that city who were fathered by the God of war, Mars.
It is entirely fitting that Fellini elected Pescatori as the poster-star of this film. On no account would you want to mess with her.
I have never been to Rome. Which is strange considering I have a long-held love of that città aperta - both in the imagination through its cinema and in its history as the center of an empire. A realm without which an European civilisation would never have arrived at pesto -infused opulence, central heating and very fast, red cars.
Roma, while bearing all the hallmarks of the Fellini language of neo-realism - satire, luxuriance of imagery, the surreal, the baroque and a John Galliano-style fantasy procession of haute couture whore-noviciates - is rooted in a lamenting, romantic nostalgia. A coda for a post-war Rome that had ceased to exist in the years following his initial arrival there as a child from Adriatic Rimini. It is an arrivederci to the 1960s and lays the runway carpet for the coming of the more uncertain, 'gender-confusion' age of the 1970s. In point of fact, the only people who profited by that decade - apart from Elton John and prog-rock musicians who amplified finger-cymbals to an audience of thousands - were effete, high street unisex hairdressers who worked on their toes while providing lavish compliments.
This poster image in its deliberately crude black and orange pantone features not one of the film's main characters but instead an uncredited actress whose celluloid appearance lasts less than thirty seconds. Anna Maria Pescatori. But those seconds in which she imprints the screen with her conviction, defiance and weltzschmerz as a prositute on the Via Appia is electrifying. Bella bruta straordinaria. She is the Roma of the film and represents the defiled Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, Wolf-mother to Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of that city who were fathered by the God of war, Mars.
It is entirely fitting that Fellini elected Pescatori as the poster-star of this film. On no account would you want to mess with her.
I have never been to Rome. Which is strange considering I have a long-held love of that città aperta - both in the imagination through its cinema and in its history as the center of an empire. A realm without which an European civilisation would never have arrived at pesto -infused opulence, central heating and very fast, red cars.
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