Roma (1972)

Boring, long, and too preachy.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Fellini's ROMA imposingly alternates between two paralleled narratives in Rome, his salad days during the WWII and the beginning of 1970s, when he is an eminent filmmaker making a new film about the city, erratically charts its local customs and folk culture to pay homage to an ancient and great city. Structurally, the film doesn't stick to a linear one, instead it disguises with a pseudo-documentary style, in fact, most of the scenes were re-constructed in Cinecittà, however, Fellini stuns audience again with his majestic undertaking which significantly blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction.The film is not just an ode to the city, more prominently, it is the clashes between past and present that reverberate strongly today. His young self (played by Falcon), a doe-eyed townie arrives in Rome for college, enjoys a boisterous dinner in the street trattoria with the entire neighbourhood, watches a shoddy variety show with crude spectators which would be interrupted by an air raid, flirts with the brothel for the first time; when time leaps forward to the 1970s, the flower-child generation is consuming with alienation and torpidity, a poetic episode of the underground metro construction team encounters an undiscovered catacomb, where fresh air breaches into the isolated space and ruins all its frescoes in a jiffy. A superlative conceit encapsulates the dilemma between modern civilisation and ancient heritage.There is no absence of Fellini-esque extravaganza, the brothels during wartime are quintessentially embellished with crazed peculiarity and vulgarity for its zeitgeist and national spirit, where sex can be simply traded as commodity without any emotional investment. The most striking one, is the flamboyant fashion-show of church accouterments organised by Princess Domitilla (De Doses) for Cardinal Ottaviani (Giovannoli), consummated in an overblown resurrection of the deceased Pope, it is sacrilege in its most diverting form, only Fellini can shape it with such grand appeal and laugh about it.Two notable celebrity cameos, Gore Vidal, expresses his love of the city from an expatriate slant, and more poignant one is from Anna Magnani, her final screen presence - Ciao, buonanotte! - a sounding farewell for this fiery cinema icon. The epilogue, riding with a band of motorists, visiting landmarks in the night, Fellini's ROMA breezily captures this city's breath of life, sentimental to its distinguished history, meanwhile vivacious even farcical in celebrating its ever-progressing motions, a charming knockout!

One reviewer asserted that, whether or not you enjoyed the film, you must recognize it as a masterpiece. Not true. Yes, it is colorful and full of memorable images. But that is not enough."Roma" is a sometimes energetic collection of sometimes surreal moments. The fact that it is an ego-centric indulgence would not invalidate the film except for the fact that it is little else. There is some entertainment value, for sure, but it never rises to the point that it truly stimulates the emotions. Being surreal, you can insert your own intellectual interpretations, but the same can be said of inkblots.In comparison, I think Woody Allen films are often self-indulgent, but they always have something to say, they entertain, and they have significant emotional content. If "Roma" had been Fellini's first film, I wonder how well it would have been received?

I have accidentally stumbled upon this film. I have watched his known masterpieces and liked them very much. But this is something special. This really breaks with the common use for film as a simple way to illustrate an epic story and goes beyond. Something achieved only by few, say Akira Kurosawa in Yume / Dreams. This is also unique as far as I know because the main / only character is a city. That has been tried even in the recent years with Paris, je t'aime, but they failed. Sure, if your kind of entertainment is Xmen Meet Rambo to Kill the Out-of-space Infidels you can bet you are going to be bored out of your head. Otherwise this is worth every minute of the two hours. And every time you get to see it more details and symbols are going to reveal themselves.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

The first half an hour of Roma is as good as anything that Fellini has made. Not following any real discernible plot, these 30 minutes largely show the thrill of a sprawling, wild lower middle class house that a young man (Fellini?) comes to stay at in Rome in the late 1930s. The scene where all the families in the apartments come out to eat pasta and snails(!) in the open air at night is thrilling for its use of stream of consciousness switch from one conversation to another - portraying the dynamism and the cheeky irreverence of Roman street life. This is film making at its best. Thereafter we switch to 1970s Rome and the mood becomes bleak. A long sequence of cars in a traffic jam in the rain with the conversations now all separate as people sit secluded away from each other. This appears to be a bleak comment on how Roman life has lost its zest. There are more switches of mood and scene all with no clear link other than they are based in Rome. Its all a bit confusing, but the first 30 minutes make it worth it. Woody Allen was clearly watching as there are many references here used in his films.