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Classic Film: 8½ (1963)

April 4, 2011 in Film | Permalink

Pauline Kael whiffed big time on "8½," calling it a "structural disaster."

An ode to giving up instead of going on, Federico Fellini’s 8½ is a mid-career, mid-life crisis film that should be self-indulgent and insufferable but is instead one of the most audacious, transformative works of art of the last half-century.

A voluptuary grown weary of the flesh, distraught director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) bathes in the soothing waters of a spa while planning his next project, an extravagant sci-fi film with a cast of thousands. His personal life seems to have just as many speaking roles, as collaborators, agents, producers, family, friends, mistresses, journalists and hangers-on attempt to push the forlorn filmmaker into completing the complex script and pull from him what they need for themselves, material or emotional. And that’s not even counting all the ghosts he encounters in his head.

Of course, Guido is far from faultless himself, having long treated his beautiful wife (Anouk Aimée) and string of mistresses carelessly. In one of the film’s famous fantasy sequences, the many women he’s done wrong turn on him and Guido brandishes a bullwhip to try to keep them at bay. But the demons that threaten his latest epic will not be turned aside, circling violently and moving in for the kill.

Guido finally has an epiphany when he decides to shut down the expensive picture and walk away from all that he has become. In the film’s final ten minutes, as the scaffolding of the set is torn down and colorful extras frolic in the ruin of his life, Guido is reborn as he accepts his collaborator’s nihilistic yet oddly soothing view of the world, realizing the figurative facades he’s built around him need to likewise be shaken to the ground. As his co-writer says to him, “It is better to destroy than create what’s unessential.”•

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