8½ stars

Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) was a recent vidi from netflix. and I must say it's rather good. I have only seen three Fellini films, two within the last month. Notti di Cabiria, Le (1957) {the other film I saw this month by Fellini} seems to have a great deal in common with 8½, both are movies about people who feel helpless in their profession and life. Both struggle with the seeming chaotic events that sweep them up and with them to an ultimately life changing decision. While Le Notti di Cabiria takes a slightly religious turn, 8½ is humanistic in it's decisions and action. Marcello Mastroianni does an excellent job portraying a director faced with indecision from the film he is trying to make, to his love life. Financial, emotional and social forces are all evenly balanced so the story doesn't fall into being another film about the making of a movie (which i am TIRED of, and the industry seems to love, movies about movies and movie-stars, and plays about plays and actors) instead the movie is about a man faced with a series of tough decisions and circumstances that have been incubated in his indecision and have now come to fruition.

Fellini's dream sequences are famous, but I'm not a huge fan of dream seqences because to do them as Fellini does you must lie to the audience to make them believe, as the character does, that it is real until it becomes too fantastic and it revealed to be a dream. Fellini and other directors pull this off successfully because the dreams are so important to the character's experience it almost doesn't matter if it's a dream or reality, the situation effects the character's decisions. Michel Gondry takes this to the extreme, almost doing away with reality altogether but keeping a semblance of it around to poke fun at and structure his story around. Fellini leaves out the stuffed horses, but still makes the dreams in this film just as important to Guido (the main character) as his waking life.

Between the two films i've seen it seems Fellini has a wonderful grasp at portraying the human experience in all it's complexities. That is what makes 8½ a good movie, the complexity in not only the responses to the driving conflict but the complexity in the conflict itself. Making the disparate parts of the conflict work together to a common climax. I am an official Mastroianni fan after seeing his great preformance in this film, and am going to check out some more of his movies soon.