A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Ginger and Fred (Federico Fellini, 1986)

Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina in Ginger and Fred
Amelia Bonetti / Ginger: Giulietta Masina
Pippo Botticella / Fred: Marcello Mastroianni
Host: Franco Fabrizi
Admiral Aulenti: Friedrich von Ledebur
Transvestite: Augusto Poderosi
Assistant Director: Martin Maria Blau
Brother Gerolamo: Jacques Henri Lartigue
Totò: Totò Mignone

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Toninio Delli Colli, Ennio Guarnerini
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Nino Baragli, Ugo De Rossi, Ruggero Mastroianni
Music: Nicola Piovani
Costume design: Danilo Donati

The two actors most associated with the films of Federico Fellini had never worked together before Ginger and Fred, and the movie is enough to make you wonder why not. To be sure, the waifish Masina of La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957) seems worlds apart from the worldly, jaded Mastroianni of La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), but both transcend those stereotypes in this film, one of the director's last. They also manage to soften and sweeten a hard and sour film that expresses Fellini's distaste for the vulgarity of modern entertainment. Ginger and Fred is an expansion on the satiric impulse that Fellini displayed much earlier in the "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), with its nightmarish awards show. Here we have a television extravaganza in which Masina's Amelia Bonetti and Mastroianni's Pippo Botticella have been asked to reunite their old dance team, in which they mimicked the routines of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. But they are herded into a phantasmagoric assemblage of headline-grabbing pseudo-celebrities and dubious variety acts. Amelia pluckily maneuvers the fading Pippo through it all. The film gained some notoriety when Rogers decided to sue the producers and distributors for trademark violation and defamation, thereby betraying the fact that she may have been a great dancer and comic actress but lacked a sense of humor. She lost. There is a shrillness to Ginger and Fred that makes it sometimes hard to take, but the two performers shine through.
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