Amarcord

"I remember" is the literal translation of Amarcord, Federico Fellini's sprawling look at Italian provincial life during the time of Mussolini. Full of autobiographical incident and nostalgia, its feat of memory proved a critical and box office success on its initial release in 1973, later winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and confirming the director's status as a master of cinema.

A plotless, hero-less movie that's more interested in the ebb and flow of life in general, Amarcord immerses us in the everyday occurrences of the titular town as it concerns various residents. It's vibrant stuff yet, in its empty sentiment and rambling inconsequence, it highlights the limits of Fellini's vision.

Watching a Fellini movie is like riding the middle float in a street parade. Recalling the hustle and bustle of circus road movie La Strada, or the restless social satire of I Vitelloni and La Dolce Vita, Amarcord gives us a clear sense of the grand sweep of life. Dozens of characters come and ago. Some speak direct to camera, others are designed to be little more than the butts of the film's many scatological jokes. Incidents and vignettes (including a series of classroom japes, bickering families and the wooing of the town's local beauty) pile up without any order or pattern. It's Fellini at work on his favourite theme: the myriad lives, loves and experiences that make up daily life. And yet, it's difficult to shake the sense that Amarcord is more about celebrating Fellini's own, peculiar obsession with the human condition.

The great Orson Welles once remarked that Fellini "shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with little to say". No other film in the director's canon proves that statement quite as keenly as Amarcord. Manufacturing its sentiment as a series of stereotypical, crazy Italians bicker, fight and fall in love with each other, it's a shallow film that seeks simply to elevate its creator as the "I" that remembers.

In such hands even the Mussolini-era backdrop becomes little more than a pretext for colourful incident as hardworking Aurelio (Armando Brancia) is hauled in for questioning by the jackbooted fascists in the wee hours of the morning. "Do you want to drink a toast to the victory of fascism?" they demand, after questioning him about anti-Mussolini sentiment in the town. "No, not, really. Not at this hour," comes the sarcastic reply. Uninterested in interrogating history, character or plot, Fellini simply blends such unconnected vignettes into a sentimental whole that has surprisingly "little to say" about anything other than its creator's own love of his material.