Director: Federico Fellini

Summary: Set in Rome, this film is based on Fellini's own memories before World War II. Italian dialogue with English subtitles.

ROMA, the Federico Fellini-directed benchmark of the Italian New Wave, explores the city of Rome from several different perspectives, giving it a mystical life of its own that hangs in the balance between its rich history and its modern identity. With no real chronology, ROMA is a tapestry of bizarre scenes and familiar images (Fellini peppers the film with easily identifiable references to his earlier works) that blend together into a gorgeous visual carnival. Typical of Fellini, with the carnival comes a critique--and ROMA tears through the city's political and religious history, satirizing the Catholic church and various faces of Italian government from Renaissance times through Mussolini's reign and on into the 1960s. While the camera lavishes affectionately over Rome's art and architecture and is clearly a tribute to the Eternal City, most of the sets in the film are constructed, reinforcing Fellini's narrative imagination and keeping viewers caught in a perpetual contradiction between reality and fantasy, history and the present, fact and fiction.

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Federico Fellini's 1972 ode to the city of Rome is far from a coherent narrative, but as a selection of images and sounds celebrating the famed Italian capital, it's dazzling and hugely enjoyable. Stylistically, it's a perfect bridge between the excesses of Satyriconand the nostalgia of Amarcord, and it showcases the true love that Fellini had for the Eternal City. Mixing autobiographical flashbacks with the travails of a present-day movie company making a film about the city (headed up by Fellini himself), Romais an impressionistic tour de force, delivered via Fellini's unique cinematic vision. If you can't tolerate Fellini's larger-than-life approach, the sometimes-garish colours, or the circus atmosphere, you'll probably find Romainsufferable. But fans of Fellini will be in seventh heaven, especially during some of the wonderful set pieces--a music dance hall performance that's interrupted by bombing during World War II; a papal fashion show that's so surreal it must be seen to be believed; and a breathtaking sequence in which the film crew, tagging along with an archaeological dig, happens upon an ancient Roman catacomb and watches as the beautiful murals disintegrate before their eyes. Through it all, Fellini's passion for Rome (and moviemaking) shines through, especially in the film's climax, a dialogue-free sequence of motorcycles roaring through the city at night, a tour that ends at the magnificent Colosseum. At that marriage of past and present, Romais about as perfect as cinema can get. --Mark Englehart

Main Language:	Italian
Region:	Region 2
Subtitles:	English
Year:	1972
Release Date:	April 28, 2003
Runtime:	114 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	15897 D V D
Keywords:	Subtitled, General, Fellini, Italian, Drama, Roma, Fellini's
Genre:	Drama