DVD Review Of Intervista

Intervista's DVD cover

Old men tend to make art that is shallow, imitative of their earlier, better works, and which would never garner an ounce of praise were it not for their backlog of greater works somehow letting their patina still rub off. In America, the best proof of this nostrum is the awarding of the lifetime Academy Award to a film director, or actor. Apparently, Europe is not immune to such worthless laurels either, for, in 1987, Federico Fellini’s disastrously bad film Intervista won the Cannes Film Festival’s Fortieth Anniversary Award and the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival.

  Fellini’s worst critics have called his films, even the great ones, self-important, self-indulgent, meandering, pointless, etc., and it feels almost as if Fellini wanted to give them a film to finally justify their lowest and worst expectations. There really is no point to the film. It’s ostensibly a film within a film within a film, but it’s a rework of 8½ in that sense, save wholly lacking in anything new to say about Fellini or the art of filmmaking. The premise is that a Japanese tv crew has come to interview Fellini on the set of a new film based upon Franz Kafka’s disastrously bad, uncompleted, and semi-comic novel Amerika. Thus, we watch them pander to The Maestro, as he refers to himself, and then see him filming his own entrée into Cinecitta film studios a half century before. What this has to do with the faux film of Amerika is a good question, and one that goes unanswered. The Fellini stand-in, Sergio Rubini- playing himself as a character, looks and acts nothing like Fellini, his scenes are pointless, and when we watch him watching the film being made into a film, we don’t really care that he is a boob, or that he lusts for a cute blond (Antonella Ponziani) on the trolley, or that he longs to interview a famous film star (Paola Liguori).

  The most celebrated sequence in the film comes a good three quarters into the picture, where Marcello Mastroianni, portraying a magician from a tv commercial, and Anita Ekberg- who has blown up into a human helium balloon so large that she can only fit into towels, not dresses, and is a sad, unwitting parody of her earlier feminine glory, entertain Fellini and his crew at her estate outside of Rome, and Mastroianni conjures up images of the two of them from their famous Trevi Fountain scene in the great La Dolce Vita (1959). Not even that iconographic footage can save this film, for Ekberg’s and Mastroianni’s reunion and interactions are as fake and mannered as this whole film, and seeing Fellini at his height only underscores how far this film is from that earlier masterpiece.

  The DVD, put out by Koch Lorber Video has only a theatrical trailer that says nothing of the film- it is Fellinian, to be sure, but hermetic. The film is in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and subtitled in gold. There is a fifty minute long documentary on Fellini and the film that is a bit self-indulgent, although not nearly so as the film itself. As we see Fellini interviewed and winning award after award, he is asked what the film is about, and he says it’s a light film about life as a filmmaker. In effect, he admits there’s nothing to it, and no real reason to see it. This is what happens to old artists- they simply run out of juice, and instead of nobly packing up their bags, they selfishly plow on. Bad films like Intervista or Saraband deny younger, more vigorous, directors the funds and entrée into the art form that the form needs to grow and persuade and move. These films are wastes of time, especially this one at just under two full hours (far too long), and money, and only sully their creators’ names.

  This mockumentary vanity project, which started as a television film, was written by Fellini and Gianfranco Angelucci, and there’s not a single moment that has depth nor truth. Perhaps the closest film to this, however, not just overall, but in the Fellini canon, is not 8½ nor Amarcord, but his 1969 tv mockumentary called Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, which is part of The Criterion Collection’s two disk 8½ release. In that film Fellini also spoofs his role as a director, and while not a good film in itself, it’s better and more intriguing than this garbage, if only for its lack of pomposity and that it is half the length this one is.

  But if the film is bad, the acting horrible (especially Fellini as The Maestro), well, the criticism of this film is the worst. So many bad critics swallowed deep on this one that it’s disgusting to read. Not a word discusses the actual execution of the film; it’s all about the celebratory intent of the film for the fallen master. Terms like ‘a film collage’ or a ‘celebration of film’, or extended psychoanalytical treatises on meaning and symbolism, should tell any discerning cineaste that schlock is about to follow. Intervista is lifeless and dull, to even Felliniastes, and when we see the typical grotesques he employs they lack any resonance because for a grotesque to work it has to contrast with a real set of developed characters. When the whole film is grotesques there is no point to the grotesque. These are the sorts of self-indulgent and narcissistic foreign films that turn most Americans off. Yes, in a sense, Intervista is still a tad better than most Hollywood schlock, but does that really give comfort to film lovers? Leftovers that have nothing to say may still make a decent meatloaf or stew when eaten, but when viewed it just looks like vomit. Pass the napkin.