153 - I Vitelloni, 1953, Italy/France. Dir. Federico Fellini.

Friday, June 2, 2017

153 - I Vitelloni, 1953, Italy/France.  Dir. Federico Fellini.

What does I Vitelloni mean?

The word I in Italian is the definite article.  It means the.  So we have The Vitelloni.

The i at the end of a word makes it plural.  The singular here ends in an e.

So The Vitelloni are a group of Vitellone.

What is a vitellone?  A bullock.

What is a bullock?  Never mind.

No, that's bollocks.  Bollocks are testicles.  A bullock is a castrated steer.

So a bullock has lost its bollocks.

OK, enough fooling around.  A bullock is a young bull.  The name of this movie is The Studs.

Five young men have grown up in a small Italian seacoast town.  They are now 30.  And they are still trying to grow up.

Although they are not trying very hard.

As long as their families support them, they have other things to do.

Fausto is the player.  He marries Sandra in a shotgun wedding.  And continues to chase women as she carries their baby.

Moraldo is Fausto's brother-in-law.  Sandra's brother.  He is the moral one.  He wants to get away.

Alberto depends on his sister Olga for money.  He is sensitive.

Leopoldo is a writer.  He longs for his big break.

Riccardo wants to act and sing.

The movie is a series of scenes in the lives of these men.  The beauty pageant that gets rained on.  The shotgun wedding.  The men taunting road workers.  Fausto's leaving his wife at the cinema to chase a lady.  Fausto's job at the store for devotional items.  Carnival.  Post-Carnival.  Alberto's sister Olga's running away.  Fausto's hitting on his boss's wife.  Fausto's firing.  The stealing of statue and their efforts to sell it.  Leopoldo's meeting with the great actor Sergio and his hopes of his performing his play.  Fausto's one-night stand that causes Sandra to run away with the baby.  Fausto's search for Sandra.  His father Francesco's beating of him with a belt.  Fausto and Sandra's reconciliation.  Moraldo's leaving by train.

There is something mesmerizing about watching a Fellini film, and his chronicling of life.

Fellini loves life.  His characters live life.  His movies feel alive.

We have spent weeks watching French films, and now as we are entering into Italian cinema we can feel the differences.

The French films feature the streets of Paris.  The Italian films showcase the open square.

Cars are important to French film, as they are in America.  In Italian films the people may walk.

The French films focus on the river.  The Italian films take place by the sea.

The French films often have loners.  The Italian films are grounded in family.  Large families.

The French films can be introverted and cerebral.  The Italian films can be extroverted and emotional.

Look at map.  France is surrounded by land.  Except for the south.  The Riviera.  It has rivers that run through it, which are important to the growth of its cities.

Yet Italy is a great peninsula.  Surrounded everywhere by the Mediterranean.  Like Florida to us.  Only more so.  When watching these movies you can smell the salt in the air.  You can feel the sand in your toes.

And when we see the architecture of Paris, despite how old it is compared to America, next to Italy it feels young.

The buildings are smashed together.  The streets are like narrow channels, pipelines running between the buildings.

But in Italy everything is open.  With wide spaces between buildings.  Buildings that were built long before French buildings.  And people walk everywhere in these open spaces.

There is another difference.

French films feel more secular.  Yes, they are Catholic just as the Italian ones.  This is the land of Notre Dame.

But religion permeates the very fabric of Italian cinema.

We saw it in Rossellini, and we are seeing it with Fellini.  Regardless of the positions of the filmmakers themselves, they are showing religion as being interwoven in their culture.

Fausto the player gets a job at a store that sells Christian items for devotion.  Crosses.  Candles.  Statues.  Robes.  His boss makes a good living.  They have steady and regular customers.  The people take it seriously.

When Fausto and Moraldo steal a statue and try to sell it, it is not hard for them to find convents and monasteries for their attempt.  They are common.

Consider that there is not a book of Parisians in the Bible.

But there is a book of Romans.

Paul went to Rome.  And he wrote his epistolary masterpiece to the church there.  And the book of Romans triggered the great revivals of history.  From Augustine to Luther to the Wesleys.

And Rome had all that history before then.

The Roman Empire.  The Holy Roman Empire.  The Roman Catholic Church.  The Vatican.

What was going on in France back then?

Compared to America, France feels old.  Compared to Italy, France feels young.

Not that the people in these Italian films feel old-fashioned.  They are very contemporary.

They just live their contemporary lives in a landscape that has an ancient history.

And we can feel it.

But family is very important here.

Everything revolves around the family.