A Movie a Day, Day 90: Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni

The film evokes a time and place and state of mind with exquisite precision.

A Movie a Day, Day 90: Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni
Photo: Janus Films

“Here’s the question: Is ‘I Vitelloni’ the work of an artist whose vision is just flowering—or that of an artist whose vision has fully ripened and is about to decay? I can’t decide,” wrote Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle.

That’s an interesting way to look at it, but I see Federico Fellini’s career more as a sine wave than an arc or a slow and steady ripening. Whatever drew Fellini to Jungian psychology, séances, psychedelics, and circuses made some of his movies too stagily fantastic for my tastes (Satyricon), while others are bathetically sentimental (La Strada, Nights of Cabiria) or both (Juliet of the Spirits). But studded throughout his career are masterpieces like 1973’s Amarcord, 1963’s , and 1953’s I Vitelloni, which use Fellini’s trademark mix of realism and fantasy with restraint, evoking a time and place and state of mind with exquisite precision.

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Fellini made I Vitelloni toward the end of Italy’s neorealist period (he co-wrote Rome, Open City) and that film’s stylistic restraint probably colors this one. There are a few of Fellini’s dreamlike images here, but none are pushed to the point of surrealism. Rather than lead us on a trek through a character’s psyche, he salts in little bursts of visual flamboyance, like the giant papier-mâché that Alberto (Alberto Sordi) waltzes with at a costume ball. Yet the style is clearly his own in this beautifully photographed and slyly funny drama, which is scored by Nino Rota and filmed with a fluidly restless camera. The people or the camera or both are almost always on the move in I Vitelloni, even as its five main characters go nowhere fast.

Alberto is one of five freeloading young men—the overgrown calves of the title—we follow for a year as they kill time in Fellini’s hometown of Rimini. Their leader, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), provides most of the plot, first by trying to duck out of marrying Sandra (Leonora Ruffo), the innocent beauty that he’s knocked up, and then by cheating on her compulsively and casually betraying everyone else he gets close to, from his father (Jean Brochard) to his employer (Carlo Romano) to his friends (one of whom, Franco Interlenghi’s Moraldo, is Sandra’s brother).

For most of I Vitelloni’s running time, we watch the five friends hang out at the beach or in the pool hall, doing their best to dodge responsibility while whining about their dead-end lives. They live for the holidays, so Fellini lingers on their frenzied all-night celebrations, but what sticks in the mind are the mornings after, when the hungover friends stumble home to the mothers and aunts and sisters who support and indulge them.

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Fellini said that he based his characters on a group of young men he observed in his hometown but didn’t hang out with, since they were older than him. That may explain the ironic perspective that his alter ego, the sensitive but too malleable Moraldo, brings to the story, which we gradually realize is about his quiet coming of age even more than it is Fausto’s.

Fellini empathizes with his overgrown boys, but he cares even more about the people they misuse so thoughtlessly—mostly Sandra, but also the other women in their lives and the men who do the work they consider themselves too good for. Time and again, Fellini gives the workers and the women the final word, right down to the film’s last lovely shot of the young boy Moraldo befriends, who’s going to work at three in the morning when Moraldo is heading home from another night of drinking. As the shopkeeper who hired Fausto puts it, after he fires Fausto for coming on to the man’s wife: “I pity you, but I pity your poor wife more.”

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Elise Nakhnikian

Elise Nakhnikian has written for Brooklyn Magazine and runs the blog Girls Can Play. She resides in Manhattan with her husband.

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