Amores na Cidade

I saw L'Amore in Citta as part of my Fellini quest. And I have to say that I found the film very interesting. Separated into five segments by five different directors, it is charming, sometimes heart breaking and I was always intrigued. All the segments are filmed absolutely beautifully especially Fellini's and Lattuada's. The music is always great, ranging from nostalgic(Rissi), bright(Fellini, though nostalgic comes under him also) and poetic(Lattuada). Of the segments my personal favourite is Lattuada's, especially for the beautiful scoring and the poetic ending. Rissi's is also very charming, very simple story but beautiful everywhere else. My least favourite, though still good, is Zavattini's, I love the climax which is very touching, as is the scene with the mother on the edge of the fountain, but found the very ending jarring compared with the scene before it and the rest of the neorealistic feel of the segment. Antonioni's documentary-like approach is interesting and the interviews are fascinating, not just the subject matter but also what there is to say. I saw L'Amore in Citta for Fellini, and apart from an ending that I think could have had more to it he doesn't disappoint. The beautiful visuals, deliberate pacing, nostalgic yet mystical story telling and colourful music are all there, and Fellini's poetic and quite ambitious style is as distinctive as you would expect. All in all, a very well done film. 8/10 Bethany Cox

An omnibus film conceived of by screenwriter Cesare Zavattini as a sort of neorealist film magazine telling the God's honest truth about love in modern (Italian) cities.

I think these European arthouse omnibus films tend to be very uneven, and this is really no exception. Carlo Lizzani (future director of some pretty kick ass poliziotteschi) and Michelangelo Antonioni turn in a couple of really dreary talking heads segments on prostitutes and suicide. Dino Risi livens things up a bit with a light hearted look at a dance hall.

Not at all surprisingly, Fellini completely steals the show with a delightfully unrealistic segment about a reporter going to a marriage broker to find a wife for his friend who thinks he's a werewolf. Zavattini and Francesco Maselli direct the second best segment, a fairly touching and tragic depiction of a single-mother unable to find work and living on the streets with her infant son. (This is very reminiscent of films he wrote for others like "Umberto D.")

The less said about Alberto Lattuada's segment the better.

So does the film work? Yeah ... but because it's conception is all that good. It was meant to be issue #1 of a series of film magazines on different topics. No others were made, which is not all that surprising since the film works to the degree that it ignores this idea and does it's own thing.

Antonioni goes deep and examines suicide caused by heartbreak. Fellini verges on his strange world. Risi lampoons the dance halls. Zavattini goes neo-realism with the love of a mother to her child. Lattuada deals with lust and perversion with bouncing breasts, swinging hips and eyes popping out of their sockets. Fellini is the most interesting one.

It is not a film for everyone, it will be understood and appreciated only by very sensitive people. Dino Risi with the dance, "Paradiso per tre ore", and "Agenzia matrimoniale" by Federico Fellini, are the best. "Storia di Caterina" by Francesco Maselli, very sad. Sad also "Tentato suicidio" by Michelangelo Antonioni. And, in the last episode, "Gli italiani si voltano" by Alberto Lattuada, we see that the Italian women of the '50s were not only more elegant than they are today, but also much more beautiful. The actors, with only about 3 exceptions, all unknown, are in fact non-professionals, real citizens playing themselves, and they are exceptional. In the last episode, that of Lattuada, the great director Marco Ferreri appears as an extra. Music by the great Mario Nascimbene. 20 stars! Ah, I can't give it 20, only 10 then.

While this was not the best work by any of the directors, it's still fascinating. Something not mentioned in the other reviews is that the film uses a framing device of a magazine--this is issue #1 of a cinema journal, with each short film introduced like an article, with a byline. It reminded me of Vertov's Kino-pravda series in that respect.

All of the stories are supposedly real-life, but some seem more real than others. In classic neorealistic style, all of the actors are non- professional, but it goes beyond that. Zavattini's segment, which has the strongest narrative, shows newspaper headlines suggesting it's entirely true; Antonioni's seems staged until one of the characters shows a scar that looks very real. Fellini's is the least documentarian segment, but still affecting.