Fellinis Satyricon [DVD]

Fellini's film is a re-telling of a masterpiece of Roman literature. "The Satyricon" ('satire', which may originally have been a dish containing many different choices of meat and fruits) was written around AD 61. Only fragments remain. It ridicules the bad taste and pretensions of Roman society, using foul language and lurid fascination with bodily function to attack high culture and art.

Born in Marseilles, Gaius Petronius, author of "The Satyricon", was Emperor Nero's style guru, a man who partied to excess. The historian, Tacitus, described him as passing his days in sleep and nights in revelry, a man famous for indolence. He fell from favour and was forced to commit suicide. Nero, himself, was fascinated by theatre, music, and literature ... and by his own pretensions as an artist. Traditionally, his reign is seen as one of violence, and of rule by a highly unstable and fractious individual whose court was a living theatre of excess.

Set near Naples, "Satyricon" has that small town, seaside setting beloved of Fellini. The story follows the romantic adventures of Encolpius ("in the groin") as he vies with his friend and rival, Ascyltos, for the affections of a beautiful young man called Giton. We are presented with a roller-coaster ride through a seemingly endless series of disjointed scenes of Roman life - a feast, a brothel, a country villa, a town house, a theatre, a picture gallery, the public baths, a ship, a shipwreck - the various characters making acerbic asides and observations on the state of the world and the foibles of its peoples.

Petronius mixed language - the cultured classes speak in the proper Latin beloved of schoolmasters, but the poorer classes curse and swear, vulgarise their grammar, and generally mangle their declensions and conjugations. Fellini faithfully follows this style, deliberately recreating the gross and the vulgar.

Petronius savagely pilloried his targets. Fellini maintains the pattern. The characters are grotesque. While Petronius's characters are real - his writing breathes with the vitality and reality of his world - Fellini's images are wholly surreal, the more so as he is holding up a 1900 year old mirror to the Italian and cultural world of his own day. Many of his images explore the pretensions and self-satisfaction of both the film maker and the film viewer (or reviewer).

Fellini is regularly self-reflexive, using his own cinematography to comment on the state of contemporary cinema and analyse the process by which we view and understand the moving image. He can take the thinnest of plots and weave around it a surreal imagery which keeps you engrossed. Fellini was also fascinated by the nature of individualism, and in particular how individualism in the 20th century was so frequently expressed through materialism and possessions. So many of the possessions in "Satyricon" are actually slaves - is this Fellini commenting on how slavishly we follow fashion and aspire after each must-have possession, until we ourselves just become the playthings of the marketing industry?

The film abounds in homoerotic images, though homosexuality for Fellini often appears synonymous with effeminacy. The sexual tensions of the film, however, satirise the depersonalising of sex - it is an act involving the body, but too often emotionally and cerebrally vacuous. Life is lived as a series of disjointed scenes - there is no flow, no purpose, it's simply remembered as highlights and underlined passages.

There is something fundamentally empty about "Satyricon". It exposes too many human foibles as facades, too much of human life as insubstantial. Watching it two or three times - or more - you can become subject to crippling self-reflexivity, questioning your own pretensions and assumptions. Is it worth the effort? Well, it makes me laugh in places, it makes me gasp in others, and sometimes I just scratch my head. It's too obtuse to warrant five stars ... to give it three would be churlish.

One complaint about the DVD. The film, naturally, is in Italian. Now, I hate dubbing foreign films, but because the post-dubbing is so (deliberately) poor on this film an English language track wouldn't have mattered so much. Especially since the only English subtitles available on the disc are for the hard of hearing. This means that those of us who are fine of hearing and who don't speak Italian have to be constantly reminded as we watch the film about which character just laughed, about the rumbling noise that accompanies an earthquake, about crowds of people yelling etc. Really off-putting, and really lazy of MGM DVD. Maybe I'll complain...