Special Valentine’s Day screening; Italian with English subtitles
One of the most significant films in Italian cinema, Fellini’s rambling, apparently inchoate 1960 masterpiece defines the swinging 60s alla Romana, with the via Veneto as the beating heart of gossip columnist and would-be novelist Marcello Rubini’s sweet life paparazzi world. We watch Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) through seven nights of excess, debauchery and decadence followed by seven dawns of pain, suffering and regret. Fellini said his film had to be seen in dual perspective: with wide-eyed innocence, as if seeing Rome and its denizens for the first time; and with experience, knowing every squalid nook and cranny. Hugely controversial at the time-found to be blasphemous and accused of both satirising and indulging the amorality of its fashionable glitterati in the new permissive age-the movie will always be remembered for the iconic Trevi fountain scene. ‘Marcello! Come here!’ is an invitation not to be missed.
Odeon Original Sound
Piazza Strozzi, 2
tel. 055/214068
