Trivial Travelogues

...at an absurdly exaggerated, heavy-handedly mirthless parody of a midnight fashion show for the clergy????with everyone from the roller-skating priests and nuns to the fantastically enthroned Pope displaying frantically satirized clerical supergarb????we are to recall fondly similar extravaganzas in 8y2 and Juliet of the Spirits...

...Quite supererogatory lieutenants, sergeants and police inspectors obtrude their irrelevant dreams, accounts of dreams, or tales of unhappy childhood????Always involving bloodshed with would-be comical overtones, or pointless, ghostly conversations with dead relatives and friends...

...poetically suggestive prurience has shrunk to digestive esurience, and the entire film is a coeatus interruptus...

...Can you see the fun in a randy married couple's creeping out the rear window to copulate in the garden and keeping their guests waiting...

...None of this coalesces into anything, and we often go from one dull, unintegrated dream sequence into someone else's equally dull and unintegrated one...

...Egomania has seldom scaled such loathsome heights...

...by the host and hostess sneaking off to make uncontrollable love in the garden and returning to find the suspicious guests hastily departed...

...This may sound like an unfunny joke, but it is, alas, the unfunny truth...

...in the music hall, where you do not literally see him...

...Do you get any laughs from a bishop's hearing the confession of a dying old man who turns out to have long ago murdered the bishop's parents, so that, just after granting absolution, the bishop shoots him...

...Innocent brother is partly sucked into all this, then jealous older woman shoots razzmatazz brother, and the other one returns to Philadelphia a wiser and sadder man...

...and during excavations for the Rome subway, old Roman frescoes are discovered????looking not like old Roman frescoes but like advertising posters for Fellini Satyricon...

...nostalgic reminiscences of Roman boarding houses, bordellos and rowdy wartime music halls...

...The direction is supposed to evoke Antonioni, but looks actually derived from Patroni Griffi and his dreadful 7/ Mare, about Capri out of season...

...they cannot, and why not...

...The basic notion, as Bunuel declared, is that "some people want to have dinner together...

...Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography is too grandiose for its theme, and all performances except Bruce Dern's are either self-parodies or just bad...

...In this combination memoir of childhood yearning for Rome...

...there are plentiful allusions to such earlier films of his as Variety Lights, I Vitelloni and Cabiria...

...The only thing that supposedly connects these disparate episodes is a visual refrain: the principal characters walking aimlessly along a rural highway...

...Locations and incidents are chosen for their supposed symbolic charge...

...In a film where everyone is misshapen, obese, emaciated, gross, desiccated, a dwarf, a giant, we see two absolutely stunning creatures: a beautiful boy and a gorgeous youth????the one portraying the adolescent, the other the youthful Fellini...

...A local bishop hires himself out as a gardener and finally kills another gardener who once killed the bishop's parents...

...What in Bob Rafelson's previous film, Five Easy Pieces, was pretentious vagueness or overstatement, here turns into pseudoprofound, hammy understatement...

...This makes good actors look poor, and limited ones like Bulle Ogier (who, in her third exposure here, proves a walking tautology) look terrible...

...Well, not quite...

...and the usual late Fellinian catalogue of circus freaks and societal grotesques, we find that all roads do not lead to Rome but to Fellini...

...From aberrant senility we move to middle-aged megalomania in Fel-lini's Roma...

...Although the subsequent films have shown unabated technical control, they have not added a jot to their maker's artistic stature...

...He plays around, meanwhile, with a woman of uncertain age and her simpering stepdaughter, and we get everything from troilism to lesbianism and the obligatory drug scene in chicly subliminal flashes...

...There is an ambassador from Miranda, a fictitious Latin American dictator-ruled country, who imports cocaine into France in the diplomatic pouch, disarms an occasional Mirandan co-ed who tries to assassinate him, and clumsily dallies with a French friend's wife...

...In Fellini's Roma, the old master is just another roaring boy...

...And so the provocative sexual fantasies of Bunuel, with socio-political and religious implications, have dwindled to mere food phantasmagoria...

...The name of the game is not Monopoly but monotony...

...Mysterious Atlantic City, out of season and out of fashion: sumptuous, empty hotels, miles of deserted boardwalk, street names like Atlantic Avenue, Marvin Gardens and all the childhood get-rich-quick dreams bred by playing Monopoly...

...With observers like Vidal and Fellini, the Western world will need no Vandals and Visigoths to speed it to its fall...

...by a fashionable restaurant's running out unprecedentedly of both coffee and tea...

...quasi-documentary (i.e., mendacious) evocations of Roman ways, byways and subways...

...at various outdoor feasts, Fellini is the focal character or the graciously self-effacing cicerone (he even allows Magnani to poke playful fun at him...

...Fellini's Roma illuminates nothing about the city's life...

...everything reeks of atmosphere, fashionably emblematic defeat, and fragments of other men's movies drearily dragging about...

...Apart from Jacob Brackman's modishly trashy script, in which incidents do not hang together and characters are only facades, there is the problem of Atlantic City refusing to take on mythic dimensions in the viewer's mind...

...If you can wax elated over these and their likes you can (a) enjoy The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, (b) join the ranks of the New York film critics who seem to have bestowed unanimous raves on the film, and (c) go down in my books as illiterate...

...The film will then trace not so much the bizarre vehicular and pedestrian tumult (itself hardly worth the footage, or mileage, lavished on it) as Fellini directing his cameraman mounted on a boom mounted on a truck, the camera shielded from the rain by a piece of wildly windblown roseate plastic...

...Jean-Claude Carriere once again collaborated on the script, and he may well be Bufiuel's evil genius, though perhaps Bunuel himself can now lay claim to that title...

...Since Belle de Jour, Bun-uel has declared every film his last...

...Given the lack of clear direction and meaning, the performers are reduced to rattling off whatever personal mannerisms they command...

...Gore Vidal, "the celebrated American writer" and Rome-inhabiting expatriate, fatuously expatiates about Rome being the perfect place from which to observe the decline of the Western world...

...Can you imagine that tired old joke about a piece of information being passed on by an impatient superior to an anxious inferior only to be obliterated by some loud noise used thrice in rapid succession...

...Subsequent meals are foiled by the proprietor's corpse on view at a country inn...

...In the bordellos, young Fellini is the most romantically ardent client...

...The entire film is an innuendo blared into your face, a children's game blown up to a tall tale...

...There is that friend himself, who, besides being a client for the cocaine, is also a gourmet and bon vivant...

...The present film is by far the poorest in true invention and the richest in dredged-up jokes, mutter-ings into the filmmaker's beard, and desperate pursuits of random senescent fantasies meant to keep an enterprise that has nowhere to go going ali the same...

...but beyond reminding us of the leitmotiv of The Milky Way, this serves no discernible purpose...

...Still other repasts remain unconsumed because they turn out to be meals in someone's dream, and further horrible dream events cut short the eating...

...The boom swings boldly over the stalled and maddened traffic, the pink plastic flaps over it like some giant bird from the Arabian Nights, and Fellini's voice booms and his ego flaps over all...

...There is another rich friend and client who has an insatiable urge for his own wife which she avidly encourages, except when she is entertaining others or boring herself...

...would that he had retired even earlier, after Viridiana and Simon of the Desert????he could have exited with a bang...

...Wheeler-dealer brother turns out to be only the lackey of successful black gangsters, and is nurturing a hotel-in-Hawaii fantasy like a castle in Spain...

...Suppose that an episode in this rambling, amorphous movie deals with traffic entering Rome from the Appian Way on a rainy evening...

...The film begins with people coming to dinner on the wrong day...

...by a group of military personnel on maneuvers arriving prematurely to claim a promised billet...

...Repe-titiousness, self-indulgence and frequent obfuscation swallow up their occasional wry felicities...

...in fact, it is not unlike its own last episode in which a motorcycle gang endlessly careers and careens through nocturnal Rome, headlights briefly hurling light beams on some historic landmark and, presto, tilting and zooming on...

...Somehow being summoned from Philly to Atlantic City is not the equivalent of going from Europe to the heart of Congolese darkness, and the attempt to make that obsolete resort simultaneously the Valhalla of Monopoly players, a spooky ghost town, and a busy capital of crime, trips over its self-contradictions...

...The plot is the old schlock classic: Decent, obscure brother answers the call of glamorous, distant brother embroiled in the Great American Success Scheme...

...And now for the puerile grandiloquence division with The King of Marvin Gardens...

...and the wife's younger sister who always tags along, cannot nold her tongue or liquor, and vomits a lot...