Fellini: I'm a Born Liar

A camera tracks crosswise alongside a wide, brightly appointed beach, in what appears to be the dead of winter. No bathers are in sight, only a rolling parade of empty cabanas, with a tranquil blue seascape in the distance beyond. The wistful, melancholy music of Nino Rota lends these vistas a dreamy familiarity. We then jump from color to luminous black & white, and a quick glimpse of Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece, 8½, in which the monumentally buxom harlot, La Saraghina, is preparing to perform her rumba on the beach for a flock of fugitive schoolboys. It's the very same beach we were just staring at, but magically denuded of 40 years of succeeding development, and made mythic through the eyes of a master. Roberto Benigni as himself appears in various clips throughout the film. From this point of departure, Damian Pettigrew juxtaposes archival footage and fresh interviews with Fellini's collaborators, including Luigi 'Titta' Benzi as himself, Italo Calvino as Ecrivain (archive footage), Dante Ferretti as Chef décorateur, Rinaldo Geleng as Peintre. The goal is to fuse these ingredients thematically, to a degree that may better illuminate Fellini's conscience and philosophies. "I am a born liar," the maestro tells us. "For me, the things that are the most real are the ones I invented." In one way or another, Fellini's habit of honestly admitting falsehood is presented, and tested, as the key to his art, and even his spirituality. Some of the contradictions in Fellini's accounts of himself are just plain funny. Donald Sutherland, who appeared with Fellini in Casanova (1976), recalls that "in his relations with actors, Federico was dreadful, a martinet, a tyrant." The film moves through its final third, the director's early manhood and lifelong collaboration with his actress wife, Giulietta Masina, are evoked through a combination of interviews and clips from 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits. We tour the stagier sets and sample the less formally scripted scenes which characterize Fellini's later work. These scenes are balanced against the filmmaker's own latter-day musings in such a way that, even if one tends to resist Fellini's later films, one is better able to see and understand them on his terms as part of an inevitable, continuous growth on his part. "Faking things, constantly faking!" says Fellini as we observe in detail his skillfully crafted, openly false, studio-built seascapes. The film ends full circle at the seascape where it began except that, now, the remnant of an abandoned camera-track is aimed straight into the sea.