Short Take: 8½

Federico Fellini's 8½ is an exuberantly imaginative film. The irony is that its subject is creative block. Marcello Mastroianni plays a celebrity film director who has hit a wall with his current project. It's a big-budget science-fiction spectacular. The director has a broad outline in place, and considerable work done on the production trappings, but he can't pull his ideas together and start filming. He tries to take a break and recharge at a luxury spa, but his producer (Guido Alberti) sends the production crew to his hotel to continue their work. Hoping to break out of his rut, he has his mistress (Sandra Milo), and then his wife (Anouk Aimée) visit the spa, too. The film is ultimately about the director coming to terms with his life, and Fellini continually shifts from his current circumstances to flashbacks about his childhood and fantasies about the various people close to him. The brilliantly allegorical fantasy sequences range from the poignant, such as the director's encounter with the ghosts of his parents, to slapstick hilarity, as with the harem set piece in which all the women he knows turn on him. The present-tense scenes are a grand farce, with the director continually trying to fend off collaborators, hangers-on, and wannabes, as well as juggle the presences of both his wife and mistress. The comic high point is when his producer (literally) drags him to a press conference at the project's most colossal set. Fellini hits every note, whether dramatic or comic, with dazzling effectiveness, and the film is gorgeous. Piero Gherari's sets and more outré costuming are wonderfully baroque, and Gianni di Venanzo's black-and-white cinematography is among the most richly beautiful in all of movies. Fellini's marvelous spatial sense and command of movement, both in the staging and camerawork, have never been better. Mastroianni and the rest of the cast are excellent, with Sandra Milo's comic turn as the airheaded mistress being the standout. The film is a delight from start to finish.