Even as We Speak (23 page)

In a TV interview given by the late Alexander Mackendrick to Stephen Frears, Mackendrick said he had always found mixing untrained actors with trained ones doubly fruitful, because the untrained
caught discipline and the trained caught naturalness. This effect can be seen working at a high pitch in
8½
. The prinicipal players have no star mannerisms: they are just people.
Mastroianni and Anouk Aimée, playing Guido’s wife, Luisa, aren’t on-screen together for much more than fifteen minutes, but the way they connect across distance burns at the
centre of the film: these are the embers of a long love, too spent to keep either party warm yet still too hot to handle. As his mistress Carla, Sandra Milo pulls off the impossible trick of being
a nitwit angel that a smart man might like to know almost as much as he would like to lay. To fatten her up for the role, Fellini made her eat until she groaned. In
Fare un Film
he calls
the character a
culone
, which more or less means that her brain is in her behind. Milo convinces you that it’s a good brain anyway. Purely physical, ecstatically devoted to her
exciting lover – he is the White Sheik from one of Fellini’s early films, but in a black hat – she is not to be blamed that he is bored with her almost as soon as she steps off
the train. It isn’t her fault: it’s his. This is about something deeper than adultery. If it was just the story of a man caught between wife and mistress and satisfied with neither, it
would be
La Dolce Vita
. But
8½
isn’t about the melodrama in the life of its protagonist, it’s about the psychodrama in his mind.

‘Didn’t you know the devil is Saraghina?’ The question that rings through
8½
rang through Fellini’s life. In
8½
the young Guido, making an
appearance in the mature Guido’s memory, hears that question from the priests and doesn’t know how to answer. Saraghina is an enormous, blowsy, barefoot madwoman who lives on the beach
and dances and exposes herself for Guido and his fellow inmates of a church school. After a flagrant exhibition by Saraghina, the young Guido gets caught, led off by the ear, and made to kneel on
dried peas while the priests put him to the question. In real life, Fellini never made a secret of Saraghina. Fellini commonly told interviewers anything that would get rid of them, but on the
subject of Saraghina he either always told the same lie or else it was a fact. In
Fare un Film
– cobbled together from a baker’s dozen interviews and articles by other people,
but reprocessed by Fellini and bearing his signature – the Saraghina story is given neat. He says that while he was at the church school in Fano, the only period in his childhood when he
spent much time away from his native town of Rimini, he visited Saraghina often and paid the price for inciting her to her revelatory routine. (She was cheap: her name meant ‘sardines’
and she would do her number for a few of them as payment.) Refusing to believe that Saraghina was the devil was obviously the essential early decision of Fellini’s emotional life. He
preferred to believe that she was an angel.

Whether of not the Saraghina episode ever happened to Fellini, or merely something like it – or, still more merely, numerous and diverse episodes scarcely at all like it but he synthesized
them later in the way that artists do – for
8½
Saraghina is one of the elements that help to dramatize Guido’s memory as a convincing determinant of his imagination. The
memory of Saraghina is the gross, unfrocked and irrepressible guarantee that Guido’s imagination can’t be a thing of refinement: the most he can hope for is to make refined things from
it, but his imagination itself must remain primitive, shaped incorrigibly by the initial impact of her uncorseted oomph. Guido is unsettled by the knowledge that his memory should dominate his
imagination in such a way. He still half regrets that he can never give the priests a satisfactory answer, still hopes that the cardinal in the steam can show him the true path. But Fellini
himself, judging from the sum of his films, seems to have been glad enough, if not exactly grateful, to have a story in his mind that would help him to script and shoot the male sexual imagination
as a divine comedy.

The mind is the house of the Lord, and in the house of the Lord there are many mansions, and one of them is a honky-tonk. Fellini’s central boldness is to embrace that fact and body it
forth without shame, but without any knowing pride either – just the embarrassment necessarily involved in being consciously human. Self-revealing without being self-exculpatory, he is not
offering
carte blanche
for adultery, a concrete act that needs excusing at the very least and is often a crime. Besides, there are married men who have never committed adultery, and one or
two of them have even reached the White House. But there is no married man who has not, like President Carter, committed adultery in his heart – meaning, of course, in his imagination, which
grows out of his memory, and has been with him always.

This interior imbroglio is
8½
’s real subject. In real life Guido is merely entangled. In his mental life he is tied to time: the rope that threatens to drag him by the leg
from the sky back down to the beach is a doubly exact metaphor, because the beach is where Fellini’s imagination began its life. Saraghina was as meaty, beaty, big and bouncy as all the
world’s women rolled into one and that’s what Guido has wanted ever since – all the women in the world. Not every woman he wants is an uncomplicated
culone
like the one
played by Sandra Milo. There is also the young, vital ideal of fructive beauty, played in
8½
by Claudia Cardinale, whose looks and personality made a unique contribution to Italian
movies in the early sixties before she went international later in the decade and rather dissipated the effect. Silvana Mangano, Sophia Loren and Monica Vitti could all act better. Even Virna Lisi
could act better, although few ever appreciated her as an actress because she was so beautiful. But Cardinale wan’t just beautiful, she had the knack of incarnating a dream type, the
aristocratic peasant. Visconti used her for that quality, twice and at length, in
Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa
(hardly seen outside Italy, it had a title from Leopardi –
Beautiful Stars of the Bear
– and a plot from hell, but she looked unputdownably scrumptious) and his much-mangled international blockbuster
The Leopard
(she was the
gorgeous up-market earth girl that Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon both cherished as the personification of authenticity, a judgement which received ironic reinforcement from the film as a whole,
camped as it was somewhere between Sicily and the abstract outworld we have since come to recognize as Planet Hollywood). In
8½
Fellini got the same charge out of her as a glorified
walk-on, a bit-part with billing. Practically all she does is turn up. But she triggers Guido’s mixed vision of carnal purity and we believe it. Dante’s Beatrice on the cover of
Vogue
. Petrarch’s Laura with an agent, an unblemished spirit in perfect flesh, she is infinitely desirable: we know he’ll be longing for her on the day he dies, if only because
he has never touched her. As a token of her power to stir his imagination, even her appearance in the actual now has a tinge of the altered, heightened pseudo-reality of the hero’s wish
world, whose bridal candour, we come to realize, doubles as white mourning. When she and Guido are for a little while alone together, in the empty piazza in Filacciano, the authentic architecture
around them, built long ago by other hands than Gherardi’s, is the only setting in the film that looks artificial, and the breeze that stirs Cardinale’s black feather boa blows only for
her, rather in the way that the envoys from the beyond in Cocteau’s
Orphée
are contained in their own micro-climate. Cardinale is Guido’s dream walking, but when she
realizes that he is idealizing her she laughs, and he realizes that she is right.

Another version of breathtaking unavailability is played by Caterina Boratto, as the guest at the spa who does nothing but descend the staircase of the grand hotel and cross the lobby.
Statuesque in a personal cloud of white chiffon, she is a poised blast from the past of the Italian cinema. Boratto was a diva of those escapist movies, made at Cinecittà in Fascism’s
heyday, in which the protagonists indicated their luxurious lives (
Vivere!
was the title of her big hit of 1936:
To Live!
) by talking into white telephones. To present a white
telephone star as a womanly ideal is Fellini’s indication that in Guido’s sexual imagination even the ideals of subtlety and refinement have something cartoon-like about them. The women
in his brain are all caricatures. He knows they are, but he’s stuck with it. His mind is in poor taste.

All the caricatures get together in one of the film’s most elaborate sequences. When he hears the word
Asanisimasa
pronounced by his old friend the vaudeville mindreader, Guido is
propelled back in his memory to a favourite place of his childhood, the barn fitted out as a small wine-factory – a
fattoria
– where he was teased, tucked up, looked after and
generally spoiled by older women. Guido goes back to the same
fattoria
in his imagination, to stage a wish-fulfilment scene in which all the women in his life, along with all the women
whom he would like to be in his life, live together in harmony: united, instead of divided, by their common desire for him. They all take their tune from the old peasant women who teased him and
tucked him up. Their only role is to spoil him. They compete in nothing except subservience. His wife is there, smiling in acquiescence: she understands his needs. Every woman he has even
fleetingly noticed in the course of the film’s real-time story turns up as a worshipper. Women we have never seen before are there too: this place has been in business for a long time. A
black girl dances through, flashing an open-mouthed white smile before snapping it shut. (I can still remember, from the first time I saw the movie, how a single American male groan outsoared the
collective Italian male whimper in an audience whose females has already audibly made it obvious that they found the whole scene a
sciocchezza
– a foolishness.)

But this isn’t just the place where Guido’s dreams come true. It is also where they go sour. An early love, an exuberant soubrette, has outlived her desirability. Desperately she
tries to interest him again but she stands revealed as just a not very good singer and dancer. Guido is ruthless with her: she has to go upstairs, where he consigns the women he no longer wants.
(In real life, Fellini might have been ruthless with the actress who plays her: Boyer reports that the actress sang and danced too well, so he made her repeat the number until she was exhausted and
in tears. However it happened, pathos certainly got into the scene.) Guido is suddenly recast as a monster. His dream women rebel, having realized that the same thing might happen to them. He has
to get his whip out and drive them like animals. It is a clear confession, on Guido’s part, that his sexual imagination is an unrealizable, incurably adolescent fantasy of banal variety and
impotent control.

Just as clearly, it is Fellini’s confession too. This is really why he made Guido a film director: not just to give him a believable role, but to show him cracking his whip over his
tumultuous desires – to show him marshalling fantasies. Fellini is assuming that in this respect a film director is just everyman writ large, or at any rate writ more obvious. It is a big
assumption, which will provide ammunition to condemn him if it is rejected as an excuse. Fellini’s real-life wife, the distinguished actress Giulietta Masina, was on the set to witness the
filming of
8½
’s key scene. It was her dubious privilege to watch her husband’s surrogate setting about his harem with a whip to bring them back into line. Masina had no
doubt long before been made aware of Fellini’s belief that what goes on in a man’s mind he can’t help, so he had better be judged on his conduct. What she thought of that belief
is one of the many secrets of their long marriage. What Fellini thought of his wife is brought out explicitly in
Fare un Film
, where he ascribes their marriage to a decision of fate and
would obviously, had he been a believer, have ascribed it to a decision of God. But you don’t need to read his book to know what she meant to him. All you have to do is look at the films,
which from
La Strada
onwards are about their marriage even when she is not in them. Sometimes, indeed, they are at their strongest on that subject when she isn’t there. In
8½
Anouk’s face,
la faccia
, is enough to establish that this wife is no willing victim but a strong, independent woman with as much class and style as her famous
husband, if not more.

Anouk’s incandescent performance shows why a director needs his prestige. Able to persuade her that she was participating in a serious project, Fellini talked her into acting against her
charm and in line with her magnificent bone structure. Fully exposed by a boyish hairstyle, those knife-edged facial planes that kept her beautiful for decades could take on overtones of a hatchet
when she was angry, and Fellini made sure that anger was almost the only emotion she was allowed to register. We are obliged to conclude that if this is a long-suffering wife, it isn’t
because she’s a patsy. The film’s moral edifice pivots on this point, because if it isn’t accepted then the whole thing looks self-serving. The plot provides Luisa with a young,
handsome, adoring admirer. She can’t get interested in him. Is Fellini saying that she forgoes mere devotion because her faithless husband is more fascinating? Most feminists would say yes.
They would have half a point, but only by hindsight. Fellini was a feminist
avant la lettre
: he had already proved that much with his early films, all of which feature, and some of which
focus on, men’s manipulation of women.