Review of I Vitelloni (1953) by Eric B — 08 Jan 2010

As a Fellini film, I Vitelloni makes far less use of the curious fast-sketch scenes, surprising close-ups, proficient handling of associations between foreground and background that shaped so much of Fellini's baroque lexicon, and there are fewer of the brutes and fantastical characters that habitate his most noticed output. In places the camera-work is unusually fixed. But notwithstanding its comparatively common approach, "The Guys" takes the first absolute dive into many of Fellini's major subjective obsessions: delayed maturity in men, marriage and infidelity, the life of insular communities counter to the city, the despondent occult of bare nighttime streets, the seashore, the movies themselves. The movie hangs us on the horns of an impenetrable quandary that is the gist of Fellini's movies. That quandary takes slightly varying routes, however eventually suggests as if to branch from the strain between childhood's feeling of awe and promise, with its whirlpool of youthful reliance and collapse if the individual can't mature, and likewise the matter-of-fact and pragmatic grasp of life's obligations and setbacks, which carries its own whirlpool of likely ridicule, bitterness and degradation.

This pressure identifies its most direct interpretation in the echoing images of the misuse of the incomprehensible, provocative or pure by those whose self-image or appetite for power has confused them about what is most valuable. The vitelloni are a kind of bucolic Rat Pack, living off mothers, sisters and fathers, dressing snazzily, chasing women and trifling their days away in a small seaside town supposedly patterned on Fellini's home town. Alberto Sordi and Leopoldo Trieste are excellent here, together with Franco Fabrizi, who bears a bizarre likeness to young Elvis Presley. Franco Interlenghi plays the pensive one and the only one on a quest for understanding the life they lead. Riccardo Fellini, dead ringer for his older director brother, is considerably more elusive as a character. Against their vainglory and apathy is postured the durability and wariness of the town's older men, who have seized the conventional duties of middle-class family life. Yet respectable as that may be, these solid citizensâ??predictable, content with their lot, stuck in choked interior settingsâ??are barely made to appear an encouraging recourse.

The closest I Vitelloni comes to any genuine representation of assurance or affirmation is the character of the station boy with whom Interlenghi passes time intermittently during his night-time roaming. I Vitelloni is replete with refined and handsomely delivered dramatic and comic moments: Sordi standing next to Fabrizi and blocking Sandra as they pose for the wedding photo; Trieste in a vainglorious rapture reading his banality-riddled play to the weathering actor Natali as the latter makes a glutton of himself and the vitelloni flirt with the female members of the actor's ensemble. Overall, Nino Rota's score strikes its own distinguishing poise between crassness and agonized reminiscence. Disinclined to endings that wrap things up too tidily, or that iron out the drama in a clear-cut fashion, despite being essentially a practical structuralist, Fellini gives us an image unfamiliar to a lot of favored filmmakers: the ending of a story shown not as a destination, instead as an adapted farewell.