FEDERICO FELLINI

A solid biography of the famed Italian director, particularly strong on the evolution of his movies’ style and subject matter.

Corriere della Sera film critic Kezich (Dino, 2004) first met Fellini (1920–93) after a screening of The White Sheik at the 1952 Venice Film Festival, forming a lifelong friendship that enables the author to knowledgeably discuss the director’s working methods and discreetly allude to his complicated personal life. (The arrivals and departures of various girlfriends are noted, though in Kezich’s judgment he remained fundamentally loyal to wife Giulietta Masina.) Fellini’s youth in the provincial town of Rimini, seedbed for I Vitelloni and Amarcord, is covered briefly; like most ambitious young Italians, he departed as soon as possible for Rome, where he was a popular newspaper columnist and radio writer before discovering his life’s work as screenwriter for Roberto Rossellini’s Open City and Paisan. Growing up in fascist Italy, young Fellini displayed a cheerful political apathy that disconcerted dogmatic critics when he achieved his first real fame in the 1950s with La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, both starring Masina. “Why was the political left so slow to recognize whose side the director was on?” asks Kezich, who correctly discerns sympathy for the underdog and hatred of repressive authority in all of Fellini’s work. Tracing the director’s progress from the scandalous La Dolce Vita and the revelatory, autobiographical 8½ through such later films as Satyricon, Orchestra Rehearsal and And the Ship Sails On, the author sees Fellini moving beyond the nostalgic, folkloric atmosphere of his early films to a more adult confrontation with modern life, explored in a bold, idiosyncratic, often surreal style. Longtime collaborators like composer Nino Rota and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno get their due, and Kezich astutely anatomizes Fellini’s tumultuous interactions with practically every Italian producer of note, including Dino De Laurentiis, and his affectionate yet charged relationship with cinematic alter-ago Marcello Mastroianni.

Fellini’s personality remains slightly elusive, but Kezich delineates his artistic achievements with authority and perceptiveness.