Review by Raymond Murray
By: Raymond Murray
In-House Review - Nov 18 2014
Set in Nero's decadent Rome, Fellini Satyricon, an free-form adaptation of the book by Petronius, is a wild and purposefully shocking phantasmagoria.
Two handsomely athletic youths, the blonde and beautiful Encolpius (Martin Potter) and ...
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Set in Nero's decadent Rome, Fellini Satyricon, an free-form adaptation of the book by Petronius, is a wild and purposefully shocking phantasmagoria.
Two handsomely athletic youths, the blonde and beautiful Encolpius (Martin Potter) and the lusty, raven-haired Ascyltus (Hiram Keller), are first seen fighting over the affections of Giton (Max Born), a strangely pretty boy. The two meet up repeatedly in this dreamlike tale which takes them through wild adventures in a world peopled with hermaphrodites, dwarves, a minotaur, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs and, of course, homosexuals!
Bold, bizarre and visually exciting, the film is imbued with oodles of homoeroticism, despite its mainly heterosexual story. Because of this, gay historian Tyler Parker once wrote that the film was "the most profoundly homosexual film of all time." This was back when such a concept was less common, but the shock-factor of Fellini Satyricon holds up today. It's a singularly strange film - now available digitally remastered and packed with special features thanks to the Criterion Collection.
A wild and shocking phantasmagoria from Fellini set in a world of hermaphrodites, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs and homosexual youths. The core of this complicated string of tales is the on-going adventures of two handsome, athletic youths who battle over the love of a strangely pretty boy. Its eye-popping visuals still excite the viewer. (Italian with English subtitles)
Review by Amos Lassen
By: Amos Lassen
"Fellini Satyricon" is an episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence and eye-catching grotesquerie that follows the exploits of two pansexual young men, the handsome scholar Encolpius (Martin Potter) and his vulgar, insatiably lusty ...
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"Fellini Satyricon" is an episodic barrage of sexual licentiousness, godless violence and eye-catching grotesquerie that follows the exploits of two pansexual young men, the handsome scholar Encolpius (Martin Potter) and his vulgar, insatiably lusty friend Ascyltus (Hiram Keller), as they journey through a landscape of free-form pagan excess. Fellini brings us a world that feels almost like science fiction and is filled with chaos. Set in the Rome of Nero, this is a free-form adaptation of the book by Petronius, is a wild and purposefully shocking phantasmagoria.
We first see our two leads as they are fighting over the affections of Giton (Max Born), a strangely pretty boy. The two meet up repeatedly in this dreamlike tale which takes them through wild adventures in a world peopled with hermaphrodites, dwarves, a minotaur, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs and, of course, homosexuals! The filled is filled wit homoeroticism even though the story is mainly heterosexual. It's a singularly strange film that is now available digitally remastered and packed with special features thanks to the Criterion Collection.
The focus of this complicated string of tales is the on-going adventures of our two handsome, athletic youths who battle over the love of a strangely pretty boy. Frederico Fellini, fully intended for the film to be a mess and it is yet it works.
Fellini uses the fragmentary source material of Petronius to his advantage, allowing him to make a film that is not a linear progression of events, or even a non-linear progression of events, but rather a mosaic glued together with random shards of dreams and reality. Characters fade in and out of the story, plot lines get added and dropped, dreams and stories constantly interrupt, it has no real ending, and when the movie does come to a close, it happens in mid-sentence. If there is a story it takes place in first-century Rome under Emperor Nero. However, this is not the historical Rome in textbooks and paintings. Instead, it is dreamy mirror image of reality, one that infuses bits of history, but also applies liberal doses of vision and imagination. Fellini's chooses to make the whole film something of a dream. But, just in case that isn't enough, he inserts smaller dream sequences and stories and flashbacks into the overall dream, giving it that much more depth. It's like a painting that has been brushed onto a number of different canvases that have been laid on top of each other.
The main purpose of "Fellini Satyricon" is not to tell a story, but to make a point and the theme is debauchery. Fellini shows pagan Rome as a mirror to modern Rome. He is saying that man may have progressed technologically, but he is still the same selfish, rude, violent, sexual, greedy predator that he was a thousand years ago. Further we see that the promiscuous bisexuality and gluttonous feasts in pagan Rome are no worse than the modern Roman orgies in Fellini's own "La Dolce Vita".
The two young men along with Giton are what Fellini wants us to identify with but this never comes together. We are never allowed time to understand or empathize with these characters. Instead, they tend to fade into the cluttered mosaic. The focus here is not character, but vision and spectacle. The film is lavish to say the least, with bright costumes and gargantuan sets (one of which is destroyed in an earthquake that ends as suddenly as it begins). Many times, there is a large number of sideshow exhibits and I guess that Fellini must have scoured the ends of the earth to find hunchbacks, dwarfs, an armless and legless midget, a hermaphrodite, and a number of people who can only be described as either grossly obese or genderless.
This is a story about love, art, apocalypse, history and dreams. I see it as a carefully sustained deconstruction of Petronius. For Fellini, the story is as much about the decadence of Rome as about the apocalyptic fall of all human culture.
None of this can be taken seriously as history, although Fellini's lavish design is probably more accurate than other traditional Roman epics ("Cleopatra" comes to mind). The film operates as a self-destructing dream-narrative built out of symbols, much more like the films of Jean Cocteau than most of Fellini's own works. In a sense, the film acts as a union of all of Fellini's usual obsessions-social class, aging, sex, and art-free from the narrative constraints of his other films.
The new Criterion edition contains many new bonus features some of which were unavailable until now and they include and audio commentary featuring an adaptation of Eileen Lanouette Hughes's memoir On the Set of "Fellini Satyricon": A Behind-the-Scenes Diary
Ciao, Federico!, Gideon Bachmann's hour-long documentary shot on the set of Fellini Satyricon
Archival interviews with director Federico Fellini
New interview with cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno
New documentary about Fellini's adaptation of Petronius's work, featuring interviews with classicists Luca Canali, a consultant on the film, and Joanna Paul
New interview with photographer Mary Ellen Mark about her experiences on the set and her iconic photographs of Fellini and his film
Felliniana, a presentation of Fellini Satyricon ephemera from the collection of Don Young
Trailer
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Wood