Amarcord is a 1973 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the village of Borgo San Giuliano (situated near the ancient walls of Rimini) in 1930s Fascist Italy. The film's title (pronounced [amarˈkɔrd]) is a Romagnol neologism for "I remember."
Titta's sentimental education is emblematic of Italy's "lapse of conscience." Fellini skewers Mussolini's ludicrous posturings and those of a Catholic Church that "imprisoned Italians in a perpetual adolescence" by mocking himself and his fellow villagers in comic scenes that underline their incapacity to adopt genuine moral responsibility or outgrow foolish sexual fantasies.
The film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Director and Best Writing, Original Screenplay.
Plot[]
A young woman hanging clothes on a line happily points out the arrival of "manine" or puffballs floating on the wind. The old man pottering beside her replies, "When puffballs come, cold winter’s done." In the village square, schoolboys jump around trying to pluck puffballs out of the air. Giudizio (Aristide Caporale), the town idiot, looks into the camera and recites a poem to spring and the swirling, drifting "manine."
At the hairdresser’s, a Fascist has just had his head newly shaved when Fiorella arrives to accompany her sister Gradisca (Magali Noël), the village beauty, to the traditional bonfire celebrating spring. As night falls, the inhabitants of Borgo make their way to the village square where Fellini presents his comic characters: the blind accordion player (Domenica Pertica) relentlessly tormented by schoolboys; Volpina (Josiane Tanzilli), the stringy blond nymphomaniac; the stout and buxom tobacconist (Maria Antonietta Beluzzi); Titta (Bruno Zanin), the rosy-cheeked adolescent protagonist based on Fellini's childhood friend; and Aurelio (Armando Brancia), Titta’s father, a construction foreman of working-class background. Modest and reserved, Aurelio responds in frenzied anger to Titta’s pranks while Miranda (Pupella Maggio), his wife, always comes to her son’s defence. Miranda’s brother, Lallo (Nando Orfei), lives with Titta’s family, sponging off his brother-in-law. In tow are Titta’s grandfather (Peppino Ianigro), a likeable old goat with an eye on the family’s young maid, and a street vendor, Biscein (Gennaro Ombra), the town’s inveterate liar.
Giudizio sits an effigy of the "Old Witch of Winter" in a chair on the stack and Gradisca is given the honour of setting it aflame. Lallo maliciously removes the ladder, trapping Giudizio atop the inferno. "I’m burning!" he screams as the crowd dances gaily round the bonfire and schoolboys run amuck exploding firecrackers. From a window, the Fascist bigwig (Ferruccio Brembilla) fires his pistol into the air. "I feel spring all over me already," says Gradisca in ecstasy.
The local aristocrat and his decrepit wife raise a toast to the dying flames. Schoolboys drag Volpina near the cinders then swing her back and forth in rhythm to the blind accordionist’s tune. A motorcyclist roars through the glowing coals in a mindless display of exhibitionism. Black-clothed women scoop the scattered embers into pans as the town lawyer (Luigi Rossi) appears walking his bicycle. Like Giudizio, he addresses the camera to explain choice titbits of the town’s history. A florid suite of raspberries interrupts his charming pedantry and he departs in a huff.
Zeus (Franco Magno), the red-haired crusty schoolmaster, presides over an official class photograph. After showing us a wall hung with the portraits of the king, the pope and Mussolini, Fellini serves up a sequence of classroom antics involving Titta, Gigliozzi (Bruno Lenzi), Ovo (Bruno Scagnetti) and Ciccio (Fernando de Felice), the class fat boy who has a crush on Aldina (Donatella Gambini), a lovely brunette. If the schoolboys are stereotypical delinquents, their teachers are ridiculous. During her inane lessons on Giotto’s perspective, the art teacher (Fides Stagni) dips a breakfast biscuit in milk. Expanding her voluptuous chest, the feral-faced maths teacher (Dina Adorni) demonstrates an algebraic formula. Clicking tongue and palate to pronounce a syllable, the Italian teacher (Mario Silvestri) is reduced to hysterics by Ovo’s parody of him. Myopic religion instructor Don Balosa (Gianfilippo Carcano) wipes his glasses and drones on while half the class sneaks out for a smoke in the toilets.
"Fu Manchu!" cries Volpina, prowling on a sunburnt beach. When workers at Aurelio's construction site invite her to join them, the foreman promptly sends her off. Mortar, an old brick-maker, is asked to recite his new poem entitled Bricks:
- My grandfather made bricks
- My father made bricks
- I make bricks, too,
- but where’s my house?
Aurelio replies with a homily on the virtues of hard work. During dinner with his family, Aurelio explodes when news arrives that Titta urinated on the neighbour's hat. The ensuing squabble builds into a delirious domestic fit.
Titta and his gang follow Gradisca on her promenade under the arcades and, when that proves fruitless, flatten their noses against an irate merchant’s shop window. Lallo and his fellow Don Juans spot a carriage-load of new prostitutes on their way to the local brothel. The news spreads like wildfire to the town's male population.
The main concerns of Don Balosa, who doubles as the town priest, are floral arrangements and making sure his schoolboys avoid masturbation. At confession he warns Titta that "Saint Louis cries when you touch yourself." Given his fantasies involving the busty tobacconist, the sensual math teacher, the fat-bottomed peasant women on bicycles, Volpina the man-eater and Gradisca whom he tried to grope at the Cinema Fulgor, Titta complains that it can’t be helped.
A dirty dust cloud announces the visit of the federale during a parade led by the local gerarca. Following behind him are the maths teacher and her colleagues, rejuvenated by Fascist rhetoric. Now in uniform, Lallo joins the parade shouting "Mussolini's got balls this big!" In a wild daydream, Ciccio stands before the giant face of Mussolini, who blesses him and his "Fascist bride", Aldina. Surreptitiously wired into the bell tower of the town church, a gramophone plays a recording of the Internationale but it is soon shot at and destroyed by gun-crazy Fascists. Owing to his anarchist past, Aurelio is brought in for questioning and forced to drink castor oil. He limps home in a nauseous state to be washed by Miranda. We discover later that it was Lallo who betrayed him.
In a series of fantasy sequences at the Grand Hotel, Gradisca is encouraged to bed the Fascist high official in return for government funds to rebuild the town's harbour while pimple-faced Biscein recounts the night he made love to twenty-eight women in the visiting sultan’s harem. The Grand Hotel also provides the backdrop to Lallo’s gang of mother-controlled layabouts who obsessively pursue middle-aged female tourists.
One summer afternoon, the family visits Uncle Teo (Ciccio Ingrassia), Aurelio’s brother, confined to an insane asylum. They take him out for a day in the country but he escapes into a tree yelling, "Voglio una donna!" ("I want a woman!"). All attempts to bring him down are met with stones that Teo carries in his pockets. A dwarf nun and two orderlies finally arrive on the scene. Marching up the ladder, the nun reprimands Teo who obediently agrees to return to the asylum. "We are all mad at times," sighs Aurelio.
The town's inhabitants embark in small boats to meet the passage of the SS Rex, the regime’s proudest technological achievement. By midnight they have fallen asleep waiting for its arrival. Awakened by a foghorn, they watch in awe as the liner sails past, capsizing their boats in its wake. Titta’s grandfather wanders lost in a disorienting fog so thick it seems to smother the house and the autumnal landscape. Walking out to the Grand Hotel, Titta and his friends find it boarded up. Like zombies, they waltz on the terrace with imaginary female partners enveloped in the fog.
The annual car race provides the occasion for Titta to daydream of winning the grand prize, Gradisca. One evening the buxom tobacconist is about to close up shop when Titta tries to cadge a cigarette. She ignores him but he catches her interest by boasting that he can lift her. Daring him to try, she’s aroused when he succeeds. Setting her back down, he goes to sit breathlessly in a corner as she draws the shop's iron shutter and exposes a breast, overwhelming Titta by her sheer size. The teenager’s awkward efforts end with him being suffocated by the very objects of his desire. Losing all interest, she sends him away after giving him the cigarette for free.
On the cusp of winter, Titta falls sick and is tended by his mother. "This will go down as the Year of the Big Snow!" announces the lawyer peering out from behind a snow bank. As Gradisca makes her way to church in the town square, Titta follows in hot pursuit and is almost run over by the motorcyclist bombing through a labyrinth of snow. On a visit to comfort his ailing mother in hospital, she tells him that it’s time he matured. A friendly snow fight breaks out between Lallo, Gradisca, and the schoolboys but is quickly interrupted by a piercing bird call. They watch mesmerized as a peacock, on the rim of a frozen fountain, shows off his magnificent tail.
Titta wakes to find the house in mourning: Miranda has died. Locking himself in his mother’s bedroom, he breaks down and cries. After the funeral he walks out to the quay just as the puffballs return drifting on the wind. In a deserted field with half the village present, Gradisca celebrates her marriage to a balding pot-bellied officer. A man raises his glass and exclaims, "She’s found her Gary Cooper!" Someone asks, "Where's Titta?" "Titta’s gone away!" cries Ovo, as Gradisca drives off with her carabiniere to the tune of the blind accordion player.
Cast[]
- Bruno Zanin as Titta
- Magali Noël as Gradisca, hairdresser
- Pupella Maggio as Miranda Biondi, Titta's mother
- Armando Brancia as Aurelio Biondi, Titta's father
- Giuseppe Ianigro as Titta's grandfather
- Nando Orfei as Lallo or "Il Pataca", Titta's uncle
- Ciccio Ingrassia as Teo, Titta's uncle
- Stefano Proietti as Oliva, Titta's brother
- Donatella Gambini as Aldina Cordini
- Gianfranco Marrocco as Son of count
- Ferdinando De Felice as Cicco
- Bruno Lenzi as Gigliozzi
- Bruno Scagnetti as Ovo
- Alvaro Vitali as Naso
- Francesco Vona as Candela
- Maria Antonietta Beluzzi as the tobacconist