Amarcord

Amarcord (1973)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071129/]

The Gist:
Amarcord is one of the stranger Fellini films I've seen. I found it a little off-putting at first, the way the film tries to encapsulate the essence of the town instead of presenting any plot movement (by the way, there is none). This feeling persisted until about a half hour into the film when I felt the rhythm settle itself around two different anchors: 1. A small Italian family and 2. A presumably omniscient narrator character a la "Our Town". Through these two anchors we are given a portrait of Italian life moments before the ruin of World War II had set in. The film did not reference the fascist rule of Mussolini too much. In fact, one elongated sequence of the man visiting the small town was the most it ever figured prominently in the plot. Given the title's translation though (Amarcord = I Remember), you can get the sense of the nostalgia the director is attempting to harness, the carefree moments before death and subsequent financial hardship. The film lacks the primal force of the directors magnificent string of subsequent films in the late fifties and early sixties (8 1/2, La Dolce, Cabiria) but it had these astonishing moments that really blew me away. My favorite was the gorgeous sequence in the fog where the grandfather of the family mused to himself as he wandered around lost about whether this was what the afterlife was like and saying if so he didn't care for it.