Gente di Roma
It's bedtime, so a tract on the decline of Italian film will have to wait for another day, but it will be delivered, never you fear. Meanwhile, the case for the prosecution presents Gente di Roma, the latest work from Ettore Scola. Your team had the misfortune to endure it last night and then fight biting winds and snow on the return trip from the cinema.
Just as James Joyce made it impossible for all Irish writers to novelize Dublin, so definitive and magisterial was his Ulysses, so Fellini's Roma seems to have dazzled Italian filmmakers to the cinematic potential of their capital. Note the word "Italian", there. After all, Peter Greenaway, who directed The Belly of An Architect, an unforgettable film about the Eternal City, was British. With Gente di Roma, however, Scola has attempted to repeat Fellini's trick and in doing so has achieved the impossible: a dull film about one of the world's greatest cities.
The wretched thing is a series of unconnected vignettes that attempts to say something, but for two of those present in the cinema last night, the pieces could not be fitted together in any way that made a semblance of sense. Granted, three of the bits work well, but the rest are so banal, so dull, so lifeless, that one has to wonder how this thing ever got released. Four thumbs down here. And so to bed and dreams of the next trip to Rome.
