Film

Any film à clef whose title translates as “I remember” risks redundancy from the outset, but don’t let the straightforward name of Federico Fellini’s free-form scrapbook fool you. Less a simplistic stroll down memory lane than a fun-house tour through Fellini’s mind, this collection of vignettes loosely based on the director’s adolescence in Rimini feels as if its creator is vividly recalling every fleeting sensation of his early life. The filmmaker had mined his youth before, notably in I Vitelloni (1953), but never with such jocularity and emotional force; it’s the memoir as a montage of dirty jokes, historical ironies, sentimental educations and some of the most lyrical imagery (the peacock!) the maestro ever concocted. Only Tarkovsky’s similar reminiscence, The Mirror, can match Amarcord for surreal intensity.

The teenage Titta (Zanin) is the closest thing the film gives us to either a Fellini avatar or a lead character, with the Catholicism-damaged boy suffering through tempestuous family dinners and prank-pulling with his cretinous, rump-obsessed crew. For once, the director’s reductive view of women is contextualized: Since the perspective is that of a hormone-blinded 15-year-old, it makes perverse, if still problematic, sense that the film’s females would be seen as curvy Tashlinesque caricatures. Yet Fellini does give the local Sophia Loren look-alike, Gradisca (Noël), a sense of dignity and depth that goes beyond being a one-dimensional object of desire. It’s she, not Titta, who leads the film’s climax, a series of long shots that watch as the town’s inhabitants fade into the distance—and permanently into Italy’s past.