Satyricon / Fellini Satyricon (1969)

Rated R, and I honestly thought that it would be NC-17.  I started making plans for where to bury this on my page because of the shame of having seen this movie.  Sure, it's on a bunch of "Must See" lists.  But it doesn't change the fact that the movie is uncomfortably sexual throughout, often beyond what would be considered into social taboos and well-entrenched in atrocities, not limited to rape.  While there is nudity throughout and sexual acts throughout, there are...safeguards from becoming NC-17.  Still, it's a lot.

DIRECTOR:  Federico Fellini

Before I lament having watching something that is actually pretty offensive to me (Yup, there is a specific subcategory of film that I loathe so thoroughly that I lose all sense of objectivity), I would like to put some some notes about the print I watched.  I booted up my Laserdisc player to watch the Criterion laserdisc of this movie.  The movie is 129 minutes.  I somehow finished in about two hours.  There was one skip, but I can't imagine it was nine minutes long because I was still in the same scene.  But early Criterion, for all their good intent, was miles away from the meticulous subtitles we'd get in contemporary releases.  There were so many sections that either weren't in Italian or Criterion deemed weren't worth their effort to subtitle.  So when I go off on this movie, I did the best I could have with what I could.

How is this on the list of movies I need to see before I die?  Now, I get it.  It's Fellini.  While Fellini's other films often are quite challenging and move beyond the realm of entertainment, Satyricon is a movie that is daring its audience to engage with it.  I would like to admit that I never read the original text for Satyricon.  From what I understand, the film is only a loose adaptation of that original work, but I can't speak from an informed perspective about the intents of the original play.  (Also a confession, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome --despite being an English teacher with a history minor -- oddly don't interest me.)  I know a lot of people, that's their bread and butter.  Not me.  I find that entire time in history incredibly frustrating.) But, geez, this movie had nothing appealing to me.

I understand that Fellini is reacting to late 1960s Italy.  Fellini is a hep enough guy to make movies in the shadows of society.  From what I understand from what I read, Fellini's making a film about a post-Christian society (which I have a hard time coming to grips with based on what I saw and what I know about Fellini) and that's why we have a movie that both struggles to have a coherent narrative (which I chalk up to the source material) and intentionally unlikable characters.  I'm going to go into my Poor Things rant right now, so please tolerate me, especially considering that I'm in the minority of people who didn't like Poor Things.  Satyricon almost starts in media res.  There is no inciting incident.  Encolpio is giving you the bare (absolutely no pun intended) bones information that you need to understand why he's in a tizzy.  And, without a breath to prep yourself, you have to get cool with the notion that he isn't fighting for anything all that glorious.  He's fighting to get back his underage sexual plaything that was stolen by his best friend.  We're meant to feel incredibly uncomfrotable.  I certainly hope that is the case because it is a pretty gross statement and goal coming out from nowhere.  I would like to point out that Encolpio is the closest thing that you find to being a quasi-heroic character.  (My point is, by comparison, everyone else in this movie is so abhorrent that Encolpio is only sympathetic because he gets the most screen time.)  

Now, the Poor Things comparison!  I do believe that Satyricon is meant to be a criticism of excess.  We're coming down in the late '60s.  We're post Summer of Love and Sexual Revolution.  And this movie is fundamentally about people fulfilling their darkest sexual pleasures without anyone batting an eye.  Okay, so I view Satyricon as a criticism of all of that.  I don't hate that notion.  And let's give it to Fellini.  After all, from a strictly technical standpoint, it is wildly impressive in scope and visuals.  Okay.  But I hated Poor Things because it was a criticism of the sexual exploitation of women while the film itself spent the entire length of the movie sexually exploiting Emma Stone.  Golly, I feel like a prude when I watch these movies, but when you throw that much sex and nudity on the screen for that long, it stops becoming a criticism and simply becomes someone's dark secret as well.  You know that there has to be a notable-to-quite-large percentage of the viewing population who find this movie to be their dark fantasy.  Like, it almost seems to want to produce viewers who act like the people in this movie.  

As a parallel thought, it also is a cruel movie.  I don't like Eli Roth.  I don't.  I've seen a handful of his stuff and it seems just mean.  Satyricon seems like a mean movie.  Every time that the movie almost hands us a real, human moment, where our protagonist(s) have a moment to breathe out and find joy in the world, it's instantly stamped out.  Part of that comes, I suppose, from the fact that it is a deeply moralistic movie.  This movie is trying to tell us about the evils of the world and it isn't going to let us decide by itself.  Instead, it is a movie that is piling on misery after misery until we're left just feeling miserable.  I can't help but think that it's also incredibly cynical.  This doesn't seem to be a goal-oriented movie, trying to pivot its audience away from the hedonism of the past.  Rather, it claims that mankind is inherently hedonistic in his very nature and that whatever pretence of morality we've displayed seems to be a mask from the reality of cruelty that we've somehow buried.

I can't help but make the comparison to Dante's Inferno (I specifically am mentioning Inferno, not the Divine Comedy.)  The easy personal read is that I found both texts frustrating, partially because of the cultural references that eluded my 21st Century American ignorance.  But both are stories about the fact that things just...are.  When you read Inferno, there's no way for Dante to affect anything in the afterlife.  We follow him on a journey through misery and, because it is the afterlife, Dante does nothing to try to stop any of the atrocities he is witnessing.  All he can do is comment that this is what happens.  There's literally a scene in Satyricon where roaring flames cook the viscera on a spit, depicting a version of hell, and never does Encolpio address the fact that this needs to be stopped.  No, it exists in the notion that this is part-and-parcel with being human, which is a bleak idea.

I'm going to close up on the most unfair statement in this whole blog.  I want to talk about individual moments, like the one-eyed man fight on the boat.  Maybe the woman setting fires.  Maybe the minotaur battle.  But this almost felt like seeing a carnival freak show (a term I don't love using).  At one point, because we just see misery, it all just bleeds together.  It's odd, because I tend to like Fellini.  Fellini has never shied away from sexual content, but I think he accomplishes more with the discussion of sexual acts than the outright portrayal of sexual acts.  The quality of the film demonstrates that he's a capable director.  It's just the fact that he gave himself few-if-any rules might have hurt him more than anything else.