directed by Federico Fellini (Italy, 1968)
Loosely based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, this absurd surreal 40-minute short by Fellini is now widely considered one of his most underrated ones. Bordering around the horror/thriller genre with copious surrealism only Fellini can pull off, this film stars the wonderful Terrence Stamp as the alcoholic down-and-out English film actor Toby Dammit who travels to Rome to star in an Italian catholic-themed action film. What follows is a series of bizarre inexplicable events, often horrifying... or is everything just his madness?
Fellini uses shaky and frenzied camerawork, often with fast zooming and out-of-focus shots, red filtered outdoor shots and intentional sloppy editing to attenuate the film's desperation to tell a story that could easily lose its direction. But when the story stops making sense after the initial few minutes, the film itself starts to get better, making the viewer embracing its absurdity and non-existantialism rather than hating it. The dialogues are incoherent, the acting is mostly overdone. But that actually helped the film getting even surreal. The brilliant original score is perhaps one the best in a Fellini film, creating a strange eerie atmosphere right from the beginning.
A major change from the story occurs in designing the devil. Instead of portraying the Devil as a sinister old man in a black suit or a vile beast with a horn and a tail, Fellini shows the Devil, a little blonde girl in a white dress, playing with a beach ball in an escalator. And that's the only thing that made sense in this film. What would Devil look like to an alcoholic egotistic suicidal maniac? Certainly not a red beast with horns. |
