Cultural Cohesion (75 page)

Not only were there hardly any dailies, there were practically no scripts. Only two complete copies of the script existed anywhere near the production. Fellini had the picture in his head. To a large extent, it happened the way you feel it happened: like a marvellous, fluent improvisation, with a freedom of expression which extended to the actors—even to those who were amateurs and needed dozens of takes to get a tricky scene right. According to Fellini's usual practice, the players, whether professional or amateur, were cast for their faces. For Fellini,
la faccia
was everything. In a little book of 1980,
Fare un Film
, Fellini said that he would have preferred not to decide on his cast until he had seen every face in the world. Fellini had always taken delight in casting untrained faces and getting precise performances out of them, but until
La Dolce Vita
he mainly confined them to the lower ranks of the cast. In
they are up among the leading figures. The role of Guido's increasingly apoplectic producer (clearly modelled on Fellini's real-life bagman, Angelo Rizzoli) is played by an industrialist, Guido Alberti. Physically ideal in his pampered rotundity, he uncorks a performance that a trained actor would be proud of. (Alberti went semi-pro afterwards: he'd got the bug.) Similarly, the screenwriter is played by a real screenwriter, Jean Rougeul. Possessing a face that begs to be slapped, he, too, is physically ideal, but it is remarkable how good he is at the lines, or how good Fellini makes him. Contrary to legend, in Italy it does matter if an actor can't say the lines properly: though Italian films are post-synched, the lips have to match the words in anything except a long shot. Rougeul, a Frenchman, had to work hard. He does an amazing job of being repellent. When he gets strung up, the audience laughs.

In a TV interview given by the late Alexander Mackendrick to Stephen Frears, Mackendrick said he had always found mixing untrained actors with trained ones doubly fruitful, because the untrained caught discipline and the trained caught naturalness. This effect can be seen working at a high pitch in
. The principal players have no star mannerisms: they are just people. Mastroianni and Anouk Aimée, playing Guido's wife, Luisa, aren't on-screen together for much more than fifteen minutes, but the way they connect across distance burns at the centre of the film: these are the embers of a long love, too spent to keep either party warm yet still too hot to handle. As his mistress Carla, Sandra Milo pulls off the impossible trick of being a nitwit angel that a smart man might like to know almost as much as he would like to lay. To fatten her up for the role, Fellini made her eat until she groaned. In
Fare un Film
he calls the character a
culone
, which more or less means that her brain is in her behind. Milo convinces you that it's a good brain anyway. Purely physical, ecstatically devoted to her exciting lover—he is the White Sheik from one of Fellini's early films, but in a black hat—she is not to be blamed that he is bored with her almost as soon as she steps off the train. It isn't her fault: it's his. This is about something deeper than adultery. If it was just the story of a man caught between wife and mistress and satisfied with neither, it would be
La Dolce Vita
. But
isn't about the melodrama in the life of its protagonist, it's about the psychodrama in his mind.

“Didn't you know the devil is Saraghina?” The question that rings through
rang through Fellini's life. In
the young Guido, making an appearance in the mature Guido's memory, hears that question from the priests and doesn't know how to answer. Saraghina is an enormous, blowsy, barefoot madwoman who lives on the beach and dances and exposes herself for Guido and his fellow inmates of a church school. After a flagrant exhibition by Saraghina, the young Guido gets caught, led off by the ear and made to kneel on dried peas while the priests put him to the question. In real life, Fellini never made a secret of Saraghina. Fellini commonly told interviewers anything that would get rid of them, but on the subject of Saraghina he either always told the same lie or else it was a fact. In
Fare un Film
—cobbled together from a baker's dozen interviews and articles by other people, but reprocessed by Fellini and bearing his signature—the Saraghina story is given neat. He says that while he was at the church school in Fano, the only period in his childhood when he spent much time away from his native town of Rimini, he visited Saraghina often and paid the price for inciting her to her revelatory routine. (She was cheap: her name meant “sardines” and she would do her number for a few of them as payment.) Refusing to believe that Saraghina was the Devil was obviously the essential early decision of Fellini's emotional life. He preferred to believe that she was an angel.

Whether or not the Saraghina episode ever happened to Fellini, or merely something like it—or, still more merely, numerous and diverse episodes scarcely at all like it but he synthesized them later in the way that artists do—for
Saraghina is one of the elements that help to dramatize Guido's memory as a convincing determinant of his imagination. The memory of Saraghina is the gross, unfrocked and irrepressible guarantee that Guido's imagination can't be a thing of refinement: the most he can hope for is to make refined things from it, but his imagination itself must remain primitive, shaped incorrigibly by the initial impact of her uncorseted oomph. Guido is unsettled by the knowledge that his memory should dominate his imagination in such a way. He still half-regrets that he can never give the priests a satisfactory answer, still hopes that the cardinal in the steam can show him the true path. But Fellini himself, judging from the sum of his films, seems to have been glad enough, if not exactly grateful, to have a story in his mind that would help him to script and shoot the male sexual imagination as a divine comedy.

The mind is the house of the Lord, and in the house of the Lord there are many mansions, and one of them is a honky-tonk. Fellini's central boldness is to embrace that fact and body it forth without shame, but without any knowing pride either—just the embarrassment necessarily involved in being consciously human. Self-revealing without being self-exculpatory, he is not offering
carte blanche
for adultery, a concrete act that needs excusing at the very least and is often a crime. Besides, there are married men who have never committed adultery, and one or two of them have even reached the White House. But there is no married man who has not, like President Carter, committed adultery in his heart—meaning, of course, in his imagination, which grows out of his memory, and has been with him always.

This interior imbroglio is
's real subject. In real life Guido is merely entangled. In his mental life he is tied to time: the rope that threatens to drag him by the leg from the sky back down to the beach is a doubly exact metaphor, because the beach is where Fellini's imagination began its life. Saraghina was as meaty, beaty, big and bouncy as all the world's women rolled into one and that's what Guido has wanted ever since—all the women in the world. Not every woman he wants is an uncomplicated
culone
like the one played by Sandra Milo. There is also the young, vital ideal of fructive beauty, played in
by Claudia Cardinale, whose looks and personality made a unique contribution to Italian movies in the early 1960s before she went international later in the decade and rather dissipated the effect. Silvana Mangano, Sophia Loren and Monica Vitti could all act better. Even Virna Lisi could act better, although few ever appreciated her as an actress because she was so beautiful. But Cardinale wasn't just beautiful, she had the knack of incarnating a dream type, the aristocratic peasant. Visconti used her for that quality, twice and at length, in
Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa
(hardly seen outside Italy, it had a title from Leopardi—
Beautiful Stars of the Bear
—and a plot from hell, but she looked unputdownably scrumptious) and his much-mangled international blockbuster
The Leopard
(she was the gorgeous upmarket earth girl that Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon both cherished as the personification of authenticity, a judgement which received ironic reinforcement from the film as a whole, camped as it was somewhere between Sicily and the abstract outworld we have since come to recognize as Planet Hollywood). In
Fellini got the same charge out of her as a glorified walk-on, a bit part with billing. Practically all she does is turn up. But she triggers Guido's mixed vision of carnal purity and we believe it. Dante's Beatrice on the cover of
Vogue
. Petrarch's Laura with an agent, an unblemished spirit in perfect flesh, she is infinitely desirable: we know he'll be longing for her on the day he dies, if only because he has never touched her. As a token of her power to stir his imagination, even her appearance in the actual now has a tinge of the altered, heightened pseudo-reality of the hero's wish world, whose bridal candour, we come to realize, doubles as white mourning. When she and Guido are for a little while alone together, in the empty piazza in Filacciano, the authentic architecture around them, built long ago by other hands than Gherardi's, is the only setting in the film that looks artificial, and the breeze that stirs Cardinale's black feather boa blows only for her, rather in the way that the envoys from the beyond in Cocteau's
Orphée
are contained in their own micro-climate. Cardinale is Guido's dream walking, but when she realizes that he is idealizing her she laughs, and he realizes that she is right.