The Dolce Life

The best view of the red carpet, I realized, was from above.

Browsing the bleachers a full hour before even the press arrived for The Rome Film Festival’s world premiere restoration of La Dolce Vita, I decided, finally, on a front row seat next to a shrunken woman of about seventy. Surrounded by blankets and snacks and cigarettes, she looked like she had been waiting all day. “No Scorsese?” she asked as I sat down beside her. (Scorsese was scheduled to introduce the film.) I told her it was still early. He’d be here. Disgusted, she threw up her hands. “No Scorsese, no cinema!” I’m not quite sure I agree, but it’s hard to disagree.

Fifty years after La Dolce Vita’s original release, the film has been restored from its original widescreen negative for the clean up of a lifetime. The premiere, which was itself a thing out of Fellini – from Nino Rota on the loudspeakers to the paparazzi on the floor – saw an avalanche of beautiful stars that all looked liked twins, save for one. Early in the parade, before things got too frenzied, a black car stopped as close to the carpet as it possibly could, a policeman flew to the door, opened it (slowly), reached in, and out came a cane, a foot, and then the rest of Anita Ekberg. The place went nuts.

As the new stars began to appear, with their smiles and waves and tastefully torn clothing, the mighty Ekberg limped wryly toward the press line, accentuating every labored step with a grande sigh. She had a lot of carpet to walk, and watching her fight it, prodding it with her cane and laughing all the while was a thrill even the most immaculately restored La Dolce Vita would not likely upstage. Moreover, Ekberg was the only woman on the red carpet with a purse slung over her shoulder, as if she had just came from lunch. How could you not love that?

I moved inside the theater to watch the rest of the arrivals on the big screen, in close up. There I rediscovered Ekberg’s entire face. Tickled, I found her jack-o-lantern smile, enormous eyes, and high-pointed eyebrows told of a darker, wittier person than I remembered from the movies. But I have a good defense: after the Trevi Fountain scene, all you can do is remember the Trevi Fountain scene.

The camera then drifted away from Anita (what would have Fellini have done with a Steadicam?) to Scorsese, and the entire theater erupted in applause and cheers, and then immediately hushed to hear what he had to say. At that moment someone behind me whispered, “You don’t have to be tall to be big.” In other words, No Scorsese, no cinema.

Once the little giant entered the building, things started to move quickly. There were a few introductions and some clips before Anita Ekberg was brought out on stage (with purse) to remember the filming, which she did with sardonic glee. I’m not sure, but she may have cackled. In fact, Ekberg got so gleeful she didn’t even see the cortege of stagehands that had gathered to signal her time was up. So she went on, gleefully, and as her enthusiasm grew, they moved closer, until finally the cluster was on stage, practically standing beside her. Even then she didn’t see them. So deep was her Fellini trance, they had to literally, almost physically, interrupt her sentence to bring her back to the present. It was glorious.

Then Scorsese. Watching La Dolce Vita, he said, is like the dream sequence – Guido freefalling – that opens 8 ½. “You feel like you’re flying,” he said. “At times it’s frightening or even terrifying. But at the same time it’s liberating.” In other words, no Fellini, no cinema.

Federico y Ginger

Amid news of a Pac-Man movie, the latest casting developments in Captain America, reviews of Iron Man 2, new TV spots for The A-Team, and Fox’s announcement of a Planet of the Apes prequel, I excavated a small piece of encouragement: Pedro Almodovar will be working with Antonio Banderas once again. The film, The Skin I Live In, will begin shooting this summer.

“The film will be a terror film, without screams or scares,” Almodovar told the Spanish daily El Pais. “It’s difficult to define and although it comes close to the terror genre – something that appeals to me that I’ve never done – I won’t respect any of its rules. It’s the harshest film I’ve ever written and Banderas’ character is brutal.”

Throughout the eighties, Almodovar and Banderas made five films together – Labyrinth of Passion, Matador, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and finally Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! – an impressive, versatile streak that, in its day, ranked with the greatest director/actor partnerships around. Back then, before Almodovar had fully cultivated his current, perversely mature sensibility, Antonio Banderas was the living embodiment of his world, Cary Grant to his Howard Hawks. Under Almodovar’s direction, the actor alternated between a screwball-state of flummoxed boyishness (like Grant in Bringing Up Baby, Monkey Business, I Was A Male War Bride) and commanding manliness (like Grant in Only Angels Have Wings) – a duality appropriate to Almodovar’s madcap feeling for passionate behavior.

Together they forged new cinematic ground (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is an NC-17 comedy about a stalker in love with a heroine addicted porn-star), pushing ahead into uncharted emotional territory that they may not have reached on their own. Katharine Hepburn’s famous remark about Fred and Ginger – “He gave her class and she gave him sex” – readily applies; Pedro is Fred, Antonio is Ginger. How else could we have been lured into rooting for Banderas, who played that memorable, lovable rapist in Matador? Teamwork.

Jimmy Stewart made cold Hitchcock warm; Mastroianni gave warm Fellini cool; and Liv Ullmann gave Bergman’s films a chance at hope, like a life preserver thrown into a cold, dark sea. Antonio Banderas – a highly gifted performer who has never really been taken seriously in America – could, as Almodovar said, play “a puerile guy with an overpowering power of seduction.” Has there ever been a better summary of Almodovar’s brand of playful intensity?

Luis Buñuel: A Personal History

The filmmaker Luis Buñuel was born in Spain on February 22, 1900, one hundred and ten years ago this week.

If they’re aggressive about it, most contemporary American filmgoers don’t get to Buñuel until their college years. By then, they’ve probably had their first run-ins with Fellini and Bergman (definitely 8 ½, maybe Persona), and have very likely sampled the early Godard, if they’re that way inclined (I wasn’t). There are variations of course (I saw Fanny and Alexander and worked backwards), but any way you get them, these are the filmmakers who picked us up from the prom, drove us up to Make Out Point, and took our Hollywood virginity.

Then, a year or so later, Buñuel creeps in there. And I do mean creeps. Maybe it was some clove-smoking girl in college, maybe it was rakish professor of World Cinema, or maybe it was the greasy guy at the video store. In either case, there comes a point when the young cinephile exhausts the Italians and the French (and Bergman), and uncovers the strange and often wonderful world of Luis Buñuel. It happens to everyone. Just as babies start to walk, children learn to speak, and grownups find their favorite drink. (Buñuel’s, but the way, was a martini. He wrote, “To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of a martini…Like all cocktails, the martini, composed essentially of gin and a few drops of Noilly Prat, seems to have been an American invention. Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative powers of the Holy Ghost pierced the virgin’s hymen ‘like a ray of sunlight through a window – leaving it unbroken.”)

I’ve digressed, but that’s how Buñuel would want it. He’d also want you to imagine me – a scholarly type, and published, soon to be twice published – with my pants down as I write this, or, like the famous scene from The Phantom of Liberty, sitting contemplatively on a gleaming white toilet, imagining myself in bed with a cold, cold, legless woman who is actually the English Prime Minster, a man, but played by a woman.

An all-around anarchist, Buñuel wants to explode everything – literal and figurative – including government buildings, traditional narrative forms, sexual mores, and Jesus Christ. As a college student beginning to understand the joys of explodability, Buñuel was just what the medcin ordered, and in films like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Obscure Object of Desire, (perennial favorite) Belle du Jour, and (my favorite) The Exterminating Angel, all aspects of civilized life were fair target. Cut to: “Another crucial recommendation is that the ice be so cold and hard that it won’t melt, since nothing’s worse than a watery martini. For those who are still with me, let me give you my personal recipe, the fruit of long experimentation and guaranteed to produce perfect results. The day before your guests arrive, put all the ingredients – glasses, gin, and shaker – in the refrigerator. Use a thermometer to make sure the ice is about twenty degrees below zero (centigrade). Don’t take anything out until your friends arrive; then pour a few drops of Noilly Prat and half a demitasse spoon of Angostura bitters over the ice. Shake it, then pour it out, leaving only the ice, which retains a faint taste of both. Then pour straight gin over the ice, shake it again, and serve.”

But just as I fell for Buñuel, I crept away from him. And I do mean crept. Buñuel’s refined esoteric sensibility (not to mention his undeniable talent) will keep his films in fashion as long as people are making movies – a terrific thing, and quite deserved – but it makes it difficult to admit – at least publicly – that in the days since college, he and I have had a tiny falling out.

Over time, I saw the mechanism behind his satire begin to creak. I saw the jabs coming, and they were the same jabs he’d been jabbing his whole life. (Part of the problem, I think, was that he was so good so early in his career – Un Chien Andalou was 1929 – that it didn’t leave him too far to go.) Buñuel, who seemed the most grown-up filmmaker – the only filmmaker ever to truly intimidate Hitchcock – seemed to me, around the time I left college, a case of arrested development. Like Hitch, he was, in the end, shackled by his perversities. He never blew them up.