Amarcord (1973)

Fellini's Amarcord arrives from 1973, which is to say from before the current vocabulary existed, and it wears that antiquity without apology. The film is a memory piece, a year in the life of a Rimini-adjacent village under Mussolini, structured by seasons and by the poplar seeds that announce spring. Titta chases Gradisca, the family endures, the town awaits the SS Rex. Fascism here is a target, mocked through the schoolmaster's recitations and the papier-mâché Duce, but the mockery is Italian and old, the satire of a man who grew up inside the thing he is ridiculing. There is a gramophone wired into the bell tower playing The Internationale, and an anarchist father forced to drink castor oil. This is the film's entire economic politics, and it amounts to a shrug.

The women are scenery for an adolescent gaze. Gradisca is a fantasy, the tobacconist is a punchline, and the segavecchia is burned in effigy each spring. Fellini casts non-professionals of every shape and size, and the effect is carnival, not advocacy. Uncle Teo's asylum, the buxom bodies, the bawdy confessions: all of it is spectacle, offered without a thesis. Nothing in the film concerns race, or the climate, or the varieties of desire that preoccupation with such matters would require. There is no sermon here, and no checklist.

Craft and melancholy are the residue. The schoolroom bores, the Church forgives nothing while fussing over flowers, and Miranda dies just as spring returns. Fellini makes his points sideways, in vignettes, and lets the audience assemble the indictment. The result is a film of enormous humane warmth that resists the categories we would now press upon it. A sommelier would call it a vintage from another cellar entirely.