Did Fellini mine the original to create his own brutto spettacolo of a pagan world- as it was in Nero’s time, and as it may be in our own? …
In his film adaptation of Petronius’s Satyricon Frederico Fellini created a memorable world of imagination. The figures and scenery appear to exist in some other dimension, which can be entered only through the doors of hallucination. It is a real shock, right in the middle of the picture, to be shown a quiet ordinary home inhabited by a handsome and perfectly sane lady and gentleman, with flowers and birds and running water and civilized manners. But even that home is doomed: the husband- apparently modeled on Thrasea Paetus- frees his slaves and kills himself, followed by his wife. Normal people cannot live in such a world.
— the dreamlike, episodic 1969 tale of Roman debauchery Fellini Satyricon! Directed by famed Italian director Federico Fellini, this strange, bawdy and extremely Roman escapade follows a pair of Romans as they explore what it means to live in the empty excess of Rome…plus minotaurs. It’s a real treat if you haven’t seen it, but be prepared to be confused and amazed!—click image for source…
Most movies set in ancient times err by making everyone too straightforward, too modern and archetypes too easily recognizable. Fellini’s Satyricon is full of abnormal people that bewilder and horrify the onlooker like the visions of Pieter Bruegel. To such a world belong most of the people of Fellini’s Satyricon. Even when they are normally built, they are masked, or grotesquely painted and ornamented, or else they look ill, or drunk, or perverted. Most of the characters in Fellini would be at home in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
—Encolpio and Ascilto (like most Romans) are openly bisexual and pederasts. I would be lying if I didn’t say upfront that this is one of the most homo-erotic films that I have ever seen. The film continues through escalating troubles as Encolpio is captured and enslaved, kills a demigod, fights a mintoaur in a labyrinth, and must find a cure for his impotence.
As gripping and interesting as the plot gets through its many different episodes (which are often as epic as one of Homer’s poems), the real strength of the film rests in Fellini’s direction and his sense of visual style. There are the times when one’s senses are almost unable to grasp everything that is happening on screen quickly enough to register them the way they must be experienced. Fellini does not let your brain rest. …–click image for source…
Despite a few reservation, it is good cinema. The world of Petronius is wild; since we only have fragments of the original book, no one can reconstruct the main plot with any certainty. But it looks as though it were a parody of love romances and of Homer’s Odyssey. The love is not the pure affection of man and woman, a wholesomeness separated by ill fortune. Rather it is the disreputable amours of homosexuals and adulterers. The hero is not a clever prince pursued by he anger of the sea god Poseidon, but a phenomenally endowed sexual athlete pursued by the anger of the sex-god Priapus.
Petronius’s Satyricon is a bizarre fantasy. It is at the same time more brutally realistic and more grotesquely fanciful than any classical work now extant. Its author has a great ear for low conversation and a wild experience of low life. It is said that there is only one comparable book, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and though replete with vile and cruel adventures, is said to be far less realistic in style. ( to be continued)…
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