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Fellini: I'm A Born Liar

2002, Movie, NR, 105 mins

Fellini: I'm A Born Liar: Review

FELLINI: I'M A BORN LIAR
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Built around a lengthy interview Federico Fellini gave several months before his death in 1993, Damian Pettigrew's elegant portrait of Italy's greatest director isn't so much a biographical overview as a sophisticated attempt to plumb the depths of il Maestro's cinematic psyche. For when it comes to Fellini, famous for turning his own life into fiction and vice versa, straightforward biography is a slippery thing. Early in Pettigrew's film, Fellini admits to being a "born liar," and says the childhood he invented for himself in such largely autobiographical films as I VITTELONI and AMARCORD has become more real to him than his actual memories. Donald Sutherland, who starred in FELLINI'S CASANOVA (1976), tells Pettigrew that, like Orson Welles, Fellini created a great lie about himself that was in many ways true, while novelist Italo Calvino points out that a writer's "lies" are not unlike the fictions spun by analysands which can be as revealing as the truth. Keeping all this in mind, Pettigrew intercuts Fellini's own ruminations on memory, childhood, his career and cinema with beautifully selected clips from the director's most personal films — including his masterpiece 8 1/2 and, interestingly, the nightmarish "Toby Dammit" episode from the 1968 anthology film SPIRITS OF THE DEAD — and interviews with screenwriters, producers and, best of all, actors. "Toby Dammit" star Terence Stamp does a hilarious imitation of Fellini, whom, he says, would never deign to address an actor directly. A typically animated Roberto Begnini recalls how Fellini thought of him as his very own Kim Novak, and Sutherland coolly describes the director as "a martinet, a tartar" whose on-set modus operandi included screaming and humiliation. Pettigrew also includes fascinating clips of Fellini at work, berating an actor during the filming of AMARCORD and manipulating a trio of lovers from FELLINI SATYRICON like a master puppeteer. General audiences will regret the absence of titles identifying various clips and interviewees, but Fellini fans will want to eat the whole thing up with a spoon. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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