Conspicuous in every aspect of his filmmaking, the biggest constant throughout Fellini’s oeuvre is a fascination with spectacle, the allure of which alternately enchants and repulses him. For all the director’s frustrations with his fellow Italians, he also shares their attraction to the outlandish, the transgressive and the morally corrupt, a relation through which his films’ humanist connections invariably flow. It’s this genuine balance of obsession and revulsion that’s so often lost in his imitators, and which, in his weakest movies, appears most out of whack, listing over into cynical antipathy. That’s unfortunately the case with Ginger and Fred, a late work in which much of that earlier joie de vivre seems to have definitively curdled, settling into a turgid disgust at the fallen state of contemporary culture.
This has a lot to do with the rise of television — long the mortal enemy of the epic director — a form in which the empyrean heights of the cinema cannot possibly be conveyed. The film’s campaign against the idiot box is so intense that it feels perverse to actually watch it on a TV, and something is admittedly lost in the transition from the intended medium. This has as much to do with the diminishment in scope as the constant use of screens, which serve as deflecting signposts amid a series of cluttered compositions, their fuzzy images and cinched borders intended to pale against (and distract from) the purer human action occurring around them. This is an effect largely lost in the home viewing experience, in which the surrounding frame becomes another element in the continuum, not a huge field capable of dwarfing the smaller scale of its inset counterparts.
Significantly, however, the film itself employs a tight 4:3 aspect ratio, the same used for this era of TV, which has a compression-enhancing effect, and perhaps fatalistically accepts that in the age of home video and all-day movie channels, it was itself fated to one day enter the same cursed limbo it depicts. Meanwhile, it’s easy to understand Fellini’s distaste for his rival form, considering the dire state of Italian programming at the time of the film’s release. Eight years before his first stint as prime minister, this was the period in which Silvio Berlusconi was bolstering his reputation as a reliable dispenser of crass, crowd-pleasing entertainments, spread out across his multiple networks. Such tawdry fare is on full display in Ginger and Fred, which largely takes place at a television studio, filtering the director’s usual roving perspective through a tepid, exhausted satire of the essential hollowness of the medium, and by extension that of the culture at large.
The story involves two retired vaudeville stars, estranged for over 30 years, who are invited to take part in a chaotic Christmas extravaganza on a popular variety show. In keeping with the general theme of low culture brought even lower by the vagaries of time, the pair were a knockoff even in their prime, with an act that hinged on imitating the American stars Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The protagonist is the de facto Ginger, real name Amelia (Giulietta Masina), who’s excited about her return to the spotlight, but worried about the reunion and the appearance itself. Her detail-oriented personality is contrasted with that of her partner, the louche, sloppy Pippo (Marcello Mastroianni) whose hungover carelessness is more closely aligned with the attitudes of the show’s producers, less concerned with the quality of the product than merely getting it on the air.
From its train station-set opening, Ginger and Fred aims to fill the frame with as much activity as possible, a seething mass of individuals all clamoring for the spotlight. While the spectacle Fellini once presented was an organic outgrowth of some intrinsic need for effusive self-expression, it has now become completely commodified; each additional screen, displaying some inane nonsense that usually comments on the main action, amplifies the air of desperation. Lives are filtered through television, the behaviors gleaned from it emulated again and again on the medium itself, a distorting refraction that creates a twisted labyrinth of recycled images and gestures.
A Christmastime setting instills a sense of seasonal repetition that furthers the impression of a tangled spiral, while also adding a sentimental gloss of sweet memories turned sour. At the same time, the scope of those memories has been amplified, with a slew of advertisements shilling gargantuan versions of familiar objects of desire, from food to breasts to rippling muscles. The synthesis of food and sex as fused avenues of consumption is the film’s most prominent visual theme, starting with an early shot of the train station crowd streaming around a phallic pig’s leg display, which spans from floor to ceiling, cleaving the frame in half. Advertising some kind of easy-fix shortcut for the traditional Emilia-Romagna Christmas dinner of stuffed pork trotter and lentils, its appearance is matched by other memorable images of lazy excess, including a game show in which contestants wolf down mammoth portions of pasta.
This is all fitting content for what’s functionally a stomachache of a movie, the post-consumerist comedown from a long career of drawing juice from such untrammeled displays. As Amelia gets closer to showtime, she’s shuffled through a Dantean landscape of hustling losers and uncaring employees, the two types of participants in this sleazy sacrificial rite. Yet she manages to preserve her poise and dignity, with Masina retaining her status as the persistent ray of light illuminating the darker corners of her husband’s cinema. Mastroianni, the one-time avatar of cool, ambivalent disaffection, has become rumpled and shabby, his character a balding drunk who needs an on-stage breather to carry out his act. In the end, Amelia returns home to her family, while he stays in town, shuffling through a concluding passage across the finally-deserted train station, the crowning tender moments in which a cranky, bitter film finally shifts the censure back upon itself.
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