(Plotlines of both 8 1/2 and Woman on a Tin Roof discussed in detail)
Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) is one of the most gorgeous black-and-white films ever made not to mention one of the most influential: it has inspired at least one terribly expensive (and terrible, period) musical (Rob Marshall's Nine), one great dance musical (Bob Fosse's All That Jazz), a royal flush of filmmakers (Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, David Lynch among many many others). If I admire it I admire it for the way the camera--like its protagonist filmmaker Guido--dances nimbly past all the men and women in his (its) life attempting to lay claim to his (its) attention. It's a heady swirl of delicate Prosecco and robust Chianti--of the enigmatic and intimate, the personal and metaphysical.
Easy to point out what I think is the film's central flaw or vice or sin: a monumental misogynistic sense of self. Famed film director Guido (Marcelo Mastroianni at his slyest, as Fellini's alter ego), suffers from a mental block--he's in charge of a major production, and doesn't know what to do, prevaricating while people around him wait for instructions. His mistress Carla (Sandra Milo, Fellini's real-life paramour) teases him, his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimee as a more glamorous Giulietta Masina) torments him. Invectives are hurled from all sides: he's naive, arrogant, pretentious, confused--a liar, a hypocrite, a man incapable of love.
Guido's all that yet gets away scot free because he's so charmingly upfront about his faults and so successful, so far (like Fellini he's done six features and three shorts, is struggling with his eighth). The arguably most emblematic scene is the fantasy sequence involving all the women in Guido's life gathered in a single dormitory, from Carla and Luisa to Guido's own mother to a handful of actresses and showgirls, including the formidable La Saraghina, a beachside prostitute looming large over his childhood. They baby him and bathe him and--at one point--rebel against him; he cracks his whip and commands them to behave.
It's a hilarious scene because it both realizes and parodies man's ultimate fantasy: to possess a harem of exotic creatures barely under one's control. Also revelatory because you can't help but suspect Fellini favors realization over parody, that the film is more self-defense than autocritique--when in the finale the director delivers an impassioned speech it's a privileged moment: everyone must pause to listen. Luisa, all understanding now where before she was nothing but resentment, steps forward to grant her blessing.
Luisa's tangled relationship with her husband gives the game away; their scenes together have an acrimony found nowhere else. Luisa is the film's only adult--she can't be fooled or distracted, she knows her husband too well; Guido is not just angry he's intimidated--he hasn't the faintest how to handle her. Would pulling out a gun and holding it to one's own head have changed her mind so easily? Wouldn't she just tell him, quietly: "Go ahead pull the trigger, you're only doing me and everyone else a favor"? Or would Guido--sorry, Fellini--pull out his pencil instead, scratch out some lines of dialogue, scribble in a new ending?
Guido's real fault, Fellini seems to want to tell us, isn't that he's flawed--everyone's flawed, it's a given of human nature--but that he's become tiresome about it. Luisa apparently isn't angry because Guido is unfaithful; she's angry because he can't be bothered to put up a spirited defense. Guido sulks not because Luisa is such a nag, but because his alibis have become lame--he lacks the ingenuity and wit to come up with anything amusing, much less credible. When he has touched bottom--curled into a fetal position beneath a long table--he can finally crawl out and start anew: be inventive when lying to Luisa again; dance nimbly past people's grasp again; produce films that delight and inspire again. He--thanks to this film--can be Fellini again, only twice as tall and larger than life, the width depth breadth of his magic depicted with some of the most divine filmmaking this side of God, the benediction of cinephiles and critics and fellow filmmakers (and wife) lubricating his way forward now and forever amen. Irony is, this may be the furthest he will ever reach; the rest of his career is (arguably, arguably) set on a slow downward slide.
Mario O'Hara's Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998) couldn't be more different. A threadbare little film partly based on a one-act play by Agapito Joaquin, shot in ten days for $62,500, the film follows the lives not of big names--stars or filmmakers--but the little people: the stuntmen who leap and tumble for your delight; the billboard artists who sketch famous faces across building-sized canvases; the aspiring writers who dream of their words spoken from the big screen; the character actors whose faces you can't forget, with names you can't quite remember. Yes, it's about 'the magic of movies,' but this is magic done not with elaborate sets and fabulist imagery but with drawn faces and haunted memories, with real-life stories lightly fictionalized and simply presented. O'Hara uses the paucity of his production to suggest the look of a film made by the very people the film is about, as if raggedy cast and crew stepped forward from behind the whirring camera to tell their raggedy story.
I've seen and enjoyed many films about films; few are as free of ego as O'Hara's. His focus is entirely on characters that traditionally play supporting roles, here seizing the once-in-a-lifetime chance of standing center stage. O'Hara pays special attention to Nitoy (Frank Rivera) and Amapola (Anita Linda)--Nitoy has amassed a collection of celebrities' pictures (the better to paint their likenesses), and is blessed--or cursed if you like--with a photographic memory of every face he has idolized. Amapola does Nitoy one better: she is cinema, her memories not secondhand anecdotes or yellowing photographs but direct experiences, vividly remembered.
In fact the direction of the gaze is what (I submit) distinguishes the two films: Fellini's is pointed mostly inwards, at his memories, his neuroses, his yearning to create great art (the latter concept being his sole concession to some ideal other than himself); O'Hara's looks outwards and backwards, at the cinema that once was (and since vanished), at the industry that now is, mercenary and predatory and unforgivingly, unforgivably hardscrabble.
In 8 1/2 the auteur-director is the protagonist, struggling to find his voice in the cacophony that is a film set; in this film he's the predator, dropping in on the set long enough to demand loyalty from cast and crew, perhaps a little sex on the side. Producers are granted the opportunity to leer at a naked Maldo (Mike Magat) while plotting the wannabe actor's future at the expense of another's career (prettyboi Eric, played by Renzo Cruz). Movie stars? Mentioned mostly in passing, their images quietly worshipped--divine beings whose asking fees are out of reach for this production's budget.
How does O'Hara's film compare with the rest of the genre? Off the top of my head Sunset Boulevard is a noirish if more conventional take on filmmaking--a writer's take I'd argue; not a big fan, though fiendishly entertaining. Ditto Sullivan's Travels (which I find more thoughtful, not to mention funnier). Bigger fan still of In a Lonely Place, which reveals itself to be an insider look at not just the industry but the three leads (actors Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart, director Nicholas Ray). Day for Night anticipates O'Hara's anecdotal gossipy form (he admits to loving the Truffaut); Contempt is very fine, is probably Godard's greatest achievement in classical narrative filmmaking (arguably it's his only exercise in classical narrative filmmaking). The Stunt Man is more metaphysically playful--is closer in spirit if not quite on the level of 8 1/2, with a raucous humor all its own. Kaagaz ke Phool shares Bubungang Lata's melodramatic soul, though it (as do the others) focuses on the auteur filmmaker.
The film's finale is simplicity itself--Nitoy sitting in his room, thumbing through what may be his most treasured photo album--but we feel as if we've traveled through years and miles and worlds (this one, the previous, the next) to arrive at this particular juncture, drive home this particular point: that little people have feelings too. Little people hurt and suffer, perhaps not as grandly and with not as much style, but with comparable intensity, and the simplicity of their suffering is echoed by the simplicity of this film--an alternate view of the world that in its own small way insists on being recognized.
Not saying 8 1/2 is necessarily lesser or overrated--it's an established classic. But Bubungang Lata does something Fellini's masterpiece doesn't: redirect one's gaze towards the margins of the silver screen, and in such a graceful, understated, unassuming manner the very gesture feels heroic. Yes, by all means see 8 1/2--or if you already have, see it again and bask (again) in its monochrome glory--but if you ever get the chance see this too, a gem that deserves wider attention.
First published in Businessworld 3.5.21
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