The Ship Sails On

This film is strange and beautiful- some of the scenes remain with me though I haven't seen it for 12 years. Most of all I recall the scene where the ship takes on a group of refugees somehow this funeral ship with its cargo of grieving operatic elite and exhausted stateless and utterly impoverished people becomes an image of great compassion and humanity and optimism even. I don't "understand" Fellini's films but I "felt" this one very passionately.

Everyone seemed to expect something special from Fellini later in life, as if all that had gone before was just preparation for a master oeuvre that would make us fall to our knees. In that sense, he kept disappointing, and with this film probably more than most. There's nothing here but quaintness and nostalgia, with a gentle, almost Tati-esquire humour – intellectually, he was going backwards, if anything. Twenty-odd years later, Fellini is now fully in context and it is easier to accept. This is what Fellini did – like it or not - the simple observation of harmless caricatures, which is actually engaging, enjoyable, even a little intriguing. Nobody is intrinsically good or bad; everyone is a set of circumstances, more or less fortunate or unfortunate; nobody harbours grudges – even here – especially here, on the eve of World War I, the end of a golden era of genteel innocence.

The first time I watched this I took against Freddie Jones' MC character. This time I liked him, or rather sympathised with him – mainly on account of the fact that since then I used to live in the next village to him in Oxfordshire where he was a well-known and amiable local character. Still regrettable though that he was clearly directed here to copy Giuletta Masina's gestures and mannerisms as closely as possible. As a journalist following events, he introduces us to the passengers on a luxury liner taking a group of opera singers, impresarios and dignitaries – including the Austrian Grand Duke – to the funeral-at-sea of a beloved diva. All of them are eccentric or charming in their own way and a succession of quaint scenes ensues as the voyage progresses – including a hypnotised chicken, a sickly rhinoceros, and a memorable scene in which the singers perform for the stokers high above the boiler room (quite a bit of this was clearly parasitised by Tornatore in "The Legend of 1900").

It all has a deliberate artificiality about it. The sea, rising and falling serenely behind the windows, is, on closer examination, made of plastic sheet. At the end, the camera pulls back to display the set and the crew – a simple indication that we are all part of some grander machination, that we are all a bunch of fools on a sinking ship, and if we all took life a little less seriously, we might enjoy it a good deal more. Once you've got in the right frame of mind, this is highly enjoyable.

There is no mistaking a Fellini film, even when you only catch the last 30 minutes, as I did when channel surfing. I made an effort to catch the full film next time it was shown, and was rewarded with a stunning feast. Not one of Fellini's best (or worst excesses) depending on your opinion of Fellini, but images that will stay with me for many years. Like Ken Russell, Fellini can always be depended on to go way over the top and never do anything by halves.

The story of a group of rich aristocrats, opera singers, hangers on and just plain rich accompanying the body of a great opera singer to her cremation on the island of her birth in 1914, is shown in Fellini's stylised fashion as an allegory on the decline of Europe in WWI. The opulent excess of the doomed rich lifestyle, which no matter how hard they tried, was never regained, contrasts with the workers slaving in order to enable the rich to enjoy that elegant privileged lifestyle. The scene where the passengers tour the boiler rooms, standing on a cat walk to look down on the stokers shovelling coal into the boilers and trilling arias while the stokers took off their caps to show respect, made me hope the catwalk would collapse and plunge the passengers into the furnace.

The stylistic storytelling reminded me of "Oh what a lovely War" Joan Littlewood's depiction of WWI as a series of songs and dances by a seaside concert party. If you want reality, you can look out of the window every day and see reality. Sometimes a surrealist view puts a different window on things. The stupendous finale of the movie is enough to make the film worthwhile if nothing else.

When younger, I was a Fellini obsessive - I adored the excess, the humour, the grotesquerie, the sympathetic comedie humaine, the audacious visuals, the beautiful, sad, lonely Marcello Mastroianni. For some reason I hadn't seen one of his pictures for a while, and while his astounding images remained inviolable in my mind's private cinema, the gradual, repeated decline of his critical status made me tread fearfully into this nautical drama.

It is clearly his worst film. It always threatens to break into a frenzied dance of the Id, like his best pictures, but never quite does. The acting is generally poor, the dubbing atrocious; the ideas seem to cancel each other out in an aimless mess. Fellini's style is more restrained than usual, with a greater, seemingly restricted, emphasis on content composition and montage. It is clearly the work of a jaded Maestro.

And yet it contains more life, wit and magic than most films this year, and, needless to say, it is less silly than Titanic. The story (a group of mourners carrying the body of a celebrated opera singer on a huge liner as World War I breaks out) is open to many allegorical interpretations (ship as nation, empire, class, art, life etc.), none of which quite fit. There is much play on images of moon (Claire de lune tinkles throughout), tides and sunsets - possibly as motifs of decline, but also of the ever-continuing circle that is its opposite, life?

The film's tone is ambivalent, nostalgic for an elegant age of art and beauty, yet coldly aware of its inhuman faults. This is epitomised by the trademark Fellini altar ego, a journalist/film narrator, who watches the mixture of tragedy and farce with an amused eye, yet desperately wants to belong, and share in its faded grandeur.

There are wonderful set-pieces, and graceful, Kubrickian camera movements. The narrative and characterisation is constantly splintered, mocking the desire of the passengers for order and rank. Imperial folly is angrily lampooned, culminating in a remarkable burlesque dogfight, stylised as a Verdi opera, yielding, in impotent terror, the Force of Destiny.

The classical music soundtrack initially seems bland and uninventive, but actually offers, once identified, a stunning, ironic commentary on the actions, pretensions, sadnesses and failures of the characters and the society they represent. The party scene with the Serbs is very moving - loaded with the mixture of anger and regret that constitute the film's heart.

The self-reflexivity does not patronise the audience for giving into illusion - the film's 'reality' is in question from the beginning. Film is shown not to be a modern weapon of the future (cinema as an art-form emerged at around the same time as the film was set), but merely a skip for the bricolage of Europe and the past. This pessimism, though, is not despairing - there is great beauty in loss.

A glittering gem of a movie that I feel deserves more attention in Fellini's canon. The motif of the ending of an era and the films positioning near the end of his career make for a particularly poignant expression. I think it is a tendency for most artist's to be seen to be at the height of their power somewhere in mid-life. Although Fellini's most challenging and provocative work preceded And the ship sails on, I can't say any are more poetic than it. It's rich sentimentality beautifully positions individual stories within the tapesty of larger world events oblivious to these characters. This film is also worth seeing if only for the stunning visuals, and the glorious music!