In Search of Fellini

It's 1993. Lucy Cunningham (Ksenia Solo) is a naive 20 year old living in small town Ohio with her dreamer mother Claire (Maria Bello). Claire is so protective that anything or anyone dying would require her to write a postcard to Lucy pretending to be the loved one or pet still alive and simply on a joyful trip. After reading a newspaper ad, Lucy decides to apply for a film job in the big city of Cleveland. She promptly loses her Vespa and the job turns out to be porn. She is drawn to a Fellini film festival which leads her to a life-changing journey to Italy while her mother hides her terminal illness.

This is a nice coming-of-age story. Quite frankly, I like this more than all those other finding-yourself-in-Italy movies. The three ladies create a great family connection. I find the surrealism in Cleveland very endearing. It could use more surrealism in Italy. It's definitely trying to recreate Fellini with many of the old film clips. It's very Fellini but it needs to be more. One way to create more surrealism is Lucy's drawings. It would be interesting to see her artwork come alive. While I like Ksenia Solo, she is in her late 20's but the character is only 20. At times, she can't quite reach the wide-eyed innocent that the role requires. The character is already more childlike than her twenty years. It's asking a lot from an actress in her late 20s. Overall, it's a wonderful trip with an appealing character.

Amazingly not a valentine to Fellini, this strange film invents and fluently speaks its own language throughout. It is pure storytelling - never veering into hero worship, it stays with the story of this young, fascinated woman on her peculiar journey of discovery. It manages to extract some of the more dazzling and compelling images from Fellini's films, particularly not to say emphatically, Giulietta Masina in La Strada and weave it facilely with the character's "real" time experiences. (How did they do that?!) I expected the worst but instead found it romantic and lighthanded, at times delightful. Anyone who goes to this film in search of parenting wisdom, will likely be disappointed. We are - refreshingly - shown her upbringing as a fait accompli without moralization, or in Fellini-like fashion. The film is the opposite of prescriptive.

Very lovely work.

You don't have to be a Fellini fan to enjoy and appreciate this movie, but if you have some familiarity, you will catch the references built into both the story and the cinematography (which is beautiful) and the Fellini clips integrated throughout. The story is a stylized, semi-autobiographical view of a solo trip co-writer Nancy Cartwright made to Italy in her early 20s after becoming enamored of the films of Federico Fellini. Ksenia Solo as Lucy, gives a wonderful performance, growing from wide eyed innocence and naivety through her experiences, good and bad (and bizarre). Her eyes alone speak volumes in every scene. Maria Bello and Mary Lynn Rajskub as Lucy's mother and aunt also shine as they negotiate their relationships both with Lucy and each other.

I found this movie on the Kanopy site through my public library's subscription, viewed via Roku streaming.

This movie has somewhat mixed reviews and after watching it I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. Inspired by writer Nancy Cartwright's own adventures when she was younger, in this fictionalized story young Lucy is 20 in 1993, in Cleveland inadvertently stumbles into a Fellini film festival and is instantly mesmerized with the images those films convey.

So she sets out to go to Italy and look up Fellini. I suppose that would be like a French girl seeing "Taxi Driver" then traveling to New York to look up Scorsese. The movie is about her adventures and misadventures. Is it just a sort of "coming of age" story?

While I enjoyed it on a certain level, and the actress playing Lucy is very good, the last scenes are a bit confusing and when it was over I wasn't quite sure what the intent of the story was.

If you're looking for a typical Hollywood cookie-cutter predictable film, stay at home and watch Bridget Jones because this isn't one of those.

Its stunning photography and enough of a Fellini film's "Huh?", mixed with a story which made me have to suspend belief a couple times but then I remembered it's not a documentary so I was good again. Oh, yeah - it's a movie! I got immersed, involved and actually got a bit emotional at the end.

I probably came away with a slightly different take on what the film was about than you will, and that's my favorite thing about art. Go see it and enjoy the beauty of your own journey with this lovely film.