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Age of Aquarius B.C., in voluptas mors. Boy meets boy loses boy, an ancient situation, Encolpius (Martin Potter) and Ascyltus (Hiram Keller) like shaggy bohemians after the dimpled twink (Max Born). The netherworld offers theatrical performances, flatulence and mutilation are audience favorites. "Every vice welcomed," innards spilled and Lucretius cribbed at the feast of Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), nouveau-riche vulgarity personified amid painted faces. Caesars rise and fall, the buggering merchant (Alain Cuny) learns of the changing of the guard aboard his galley and a second later his severed noggin sinks in the sea. A vast sauna punctuated by tremors and glimpses of art, cf. Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. "The masterpieces in this gallery reveal our current malaise." Federico Fellini on Petronius is a limitless fresco, a foul-smelling fugue, an ecstatic explosion of the sword-and-sandal peplum. The extraterrestrial side of antiquity, crimson horizons and pink sands and boiling yellows for a most riotous Roman mind. An interlude of rare tenderness with a chattering slave girl and a view of the constellations, then Cocteau's oracular hermaphrodite (Le Sang d'un Poète) withered in the desert. "Even Venus was cross-eyed." The duel with the Minotaur is a prank under a blasting sun, the reward is a flaccid brush with the meaty wanton, "like a drowned mouse atop a cow." Numerous divagations make up the pansexual picturesque, therapy at the Garden of Delights includes the legend of the fire-crotch sorceress (Donyale Luna) and the hallucinatory embrace of Seraghina's African ancestor. Floating in and out is Eumolpus (Salvo Randone), poet and parasite and Fellini stand-in, scalded and pampered and devoured. "Come now, mortals. Fill your hearts with dreams." Parajanov runs parallel with The Color of Pomegranates, Pasolini has his riposte in Arabian Nights. Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno. With Capucine, Magali Noël, Fanfulla, Lucia Bosé, Elisa Mainardi, Danika La Loggia, Hylette Adolphe, Lorenzo Piani, and George Eastman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |