Taxing as it might be for the audience to sympathize with Ivan Cavalli, when Wanda whispers to him at the end that she did not sin, and thus remains innocent, one is more or less prone to be touched by what seems to be a bitter-sweet reconciliation between a dreamy, starstruck young wife and a husband for whom the preservation of honor constitutes the singularly most important imperative: as Ivan smiles at Wanda's repentance and the camera zooms out, ending the movie with the couple running on the piazza to catch their appointment with the pope against the circusy music by Nino Rota, some might even be tempted to call it a happy ending.
Great movies attain their greatness not merely through brilliant technical details but also through a rare perspicuity that is sometimes mistaken for simplicity. Taken at face value, The White Sheik might just be a simple comedy: a couple travels to Rome for their honeymoon, whereupon the wife sneaks away to meet a Fumetti star, the White Sheik, and the husband left to cover up for her disappearance in front of his not so gullible family. When Wanda realizes, however, that the White Sheik in reality does not live up to his image, she recognizes one of the many faces of the "cruel fate," as she rightfully puts it, and commits suicide unsuccessfully, to later return to Ivan and their marriage. The first difficulty for a more discerning audience, nevertheless, lies in the hint of Flaubertine note in the story. Just Like Emma, Wanda is fed up with the philistines around her and is bedazzled by a dream that is largely a product of, as Vladimir Nabokov might put it, her poor taste as a philistine herself. And just like Emma, Wanda attempts at closing the gap between reality and dream by performing -- indeed acting out -- the latter. What can be "rosy" about this neorealistic, intensely farcical flick, however, is that the writers (Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano and Michelangelo Antonioni along with Fellini) never allowed Wanda to pass the point of no return, which makes possible her later reinitiation into the family (the uncle -- the patriarch, after sizing her up for a while, extends a warm embrace) as well as the movie's deceptively light-hearted tone.
In this way, Wanda, both in motivation and consequence, commits a lesser "crime" compared to Emma, and the way she is shielded from culpability -- as sanctioned by Ivan and the movie -- can be adequately attributed to her lack of ability to act/perform: she sneaks away only upon the White Sheik's invitation ("she doesn't know anyone in Rome," complains the unknowing Ivan), her little escapade prolonged only because the crew, without asking for consent, drives her to the countryside, 26 kilometers away from Rome, where they shoot the Fumetti. The movie never shows us how she gets a cameo on set, and when they sail out, the White Sheik's attempt at seducing her is sabotaged, not by her rejection, but by a timely swinging mast.
Innocent, impressionable, and immobile, Wanda is in many ways "coaxed" into a "crime" to which she herself is no less an accomplice but which only actualized unconsciously. The "crime" here is not so much her disloyalty to her husband (her runaway is more of a child's blunder than a woman's willful deceit) as the effect of her disappearance on the Cavalli's good name, a fact that Wanda and Ivan as petits-bourgeois are only too painfully aware of, in a particular locus where catholicism has its tight grip especially on the more provincial parts (where Ivan and Wanda comes from, as the movie implies) and minds. Upon reuniting with Wanda, Ivan mistakes her for having had sex with another man, but despite his agony, his imperative pervails when he apopletically demands her to put on the proper attire and go see the pope, as scheduled by his uncle, who, though having suspected that something fishy is going on, is still under the impression that Wanda is only sick in bed. The ruse, on Ivan's side, lives on, and Wanda quietly takes up a renewed role of accomplice in the cover up of her own "crime."
The dissolution of the "crime," a requisite for the farce to end, is then two-pronged: on one hand, through a miracle; on the other, through Wanda's passivity/innocence. Fellini does not intend this movie to carry much religious undertone, since the urgency of the couple's appointment with the pope derives from the fact that it is arranged by Ivan's uncle, who occupies a dubiously "important" office at Vatican, and not from the papacy itself. Such eagerness to oblige someone who lodges higher in the social stratum at the same time someone who assumes the role of the patriarch is, to be sure, both clearly presented and only worldly. The miracle we are talking about, nevertheless, is impossibly religious and hilarious. When Wanda attempts to commit suicide by the river, it turns out to be only ankle-deep, leaving Wanda baptized and, consequently, saved by an alerted passerby. This absolution arrives both as an aftermath and a herald to Wanda's innocence; the former, for Wanda has uphold her integrity by means of passivity; the latter, for the suicide allows Wanda to participate in the act of "redeeming" herself, and though her plan is botched, it nevertheless provides a pathway for her innocence to enter her consciousness: the will to repent can be, after all, a proverbial source of courage.
What gets even more interesting is how Fellini utilizes moments of deus ex machina to jack up the hilarity (as well as the folly) of circumstances. The first one is Wanda's foiled suicide. Here, we are witnessing a woman who spends most of her time on screen in paralysis finally acting on her own will (though ironically one leading to her own destruction) and spectacularly fails because of a deceptively deep river. The other, the mast that almost purposefully knocks on the White Sheik, provides a perfect situation in which Wanda's danger of being seduced dissipates on itself and hence, no decision is to be made and no morality jeopardized. Admittedly, what keeps a farce going is the constant frustration of plans and desires, whose consummation would invariably end the chase once and for all. It is in this way that we might object that these two instances were but exemplifications of the most fundamental comedy law. But the joke does not simply end there. In these two monumental moments, Wanda is metaphysically stranded on the island between paralysis and activity: when paralyzed, she is merely shoved around, in fact transacted hand to hand, by those who "have a plan;" and when she takes on her own plan, it is bluntly thwarted. Besieged both way, Wanda is trapped in a quandary not only relevant to the problematics of feminism but also to the problematics of modernity, where the efficacy of action as a myth, a strategy, and a performance is called to attention, if not already bankrupted.
Indeed, one laughs for many reasons when Wanda fails to drown. There's the classic irony of a person being denied of interacting with her circumstances meaningfully, and there's the affected, clumsy performance of suicide Brunella Bovo brilliantly adopts. The folly of innocence, when blended with the right amount of sentimentalism and poor taste, often leads to genuine and self-important emotional investment in actions that shrivel under the severity of intention. Almost as if she's too ill-at-ease with her newfound activity, at the same time too well informed of the burlesque, questinonably "exotic" and inexorably romantic adventure plot lines of the popular Fumetti, Wanda performs, with the tritest lines, her penitence when leaving a message for her husband, and, when she sees a painting of skull on the wall, is immediately inspired to stage her suicide, dictating instead of regrets her final words, in equally trite terms, to a concierge who appropriately couldn’t care less. To discuss the mawkish, indeed poor, theatricality of Wanda’s suicide is not, however, to discredit her genuine sorrow and her will to carry the deed out; it is precisely her seriousness, juxtaposed to the insignificance of her “crime,” that funds the hilarity of her failure, at the same time unsettling the audience with the disproportionate (self)punishment. Comical and sad at the same time, Wanda’s decision to die reveals not only the fact that she cannot act, but also the fact that she is trapped by clichés disseminated through popular culture that deprive her of any seriousness to be treated with.
Such insignificance of action, thoughts, and will, though the common language of comedy, nevertheless serves a wide array of purposes. For someone like Fellini, who’s invariably interested in the variety show, the circus, the farce, the spectacle, the outsider, and the weirdo, there is a wistful tenderness to the idea of performance (taken to its extreme forrm, freak shows). On the one hand, the clowns make themselves the punchline of the joke; on the other hand, there is the haunting mediocrity and dullness of, inevitably, life, that invades the space where laughters cannot penetrate. Whether one is consciously or unconsciously subscribing to a given script, whether one has an audience or not, one performs according to a larger order that more often than not strips one of idiosyncrasy, originality, and creation, contrary to how one might have appeared. There are many small ways we get to usurp such order, as Michel de Certeau rightfully points out, but the order remains the reference point, exerting the centripetal force that keeps one spinning on and on around something located outside of oneself. It is made clear to the audience that the urgency of Ivan's task of locating Wanda derives, at least partially, from the need to maintain a certain social order, the compliance with which creates a sense of security at the same time an illusion of dignity. Above all, one is also led to question Ivan's notion of love when his plan for the honeymoon precludes Wanda's participation. When Ivan is haplessly wandering in the metropolis, he is strained not as much by the prospect of losing his love as by the possibility of subverting, inadvertently, the social order upon which his family and his sense of self is founded, flourishes, and now going to flounder. When prompted, he shares the photos of Wanda with Calibria, identifying her as someone that is altogether an illusion of what Wanda appears to the rest of us: a straight A student and a beauty, which is, again, in line with his delusions about his partner from the very beginning, which is also the reason why he can never anticipate her leaving. He runs on and on, breathlessly, around a center point, like an obstinate pair of compasses, whose futility, both of action and love, is only predetermined by his circular trajectory that would never lead him anywhere.
Take the White Sheik, for another example. Alberto Sordi's excellent rendition of an haughty, debonair celebrity of a pulp production is inspired by an immemorial but stubborn idea of gallantry, complemented with equally trite speeches. Despite his suave mannerism, he remains just another Fellini's clown, who, by force of habit, continues to perform a character that is larger than life, whose later exposé again points to the precariousness of pretending what one isn't. But performance needs not be reduced to merely a lie. Fellini's sweetness is inherent in his treatment of performance as a dream as what dream in all truth is. It is spectacle fabricated and invented for us to behold and marvel at, an exit of life, which is easily blunted once our ability to fabricate and invent is dulled by the various orders we are initiated into. But it is also make-believe painstakingly created to pilfer the qualities of the reality: a dream would cease to be a dream if our attention is called to its nature as a fraud. To that extent, a dream also presents us with a paradox. Those who always wake up from it would find it more difficult to dream, and those who barely wakes up from it would no longer be able to distinguish the boundaries between fabrication and reality. The White Sheik and Wanda both belong to the latter, and there's almost a whiff of charming naïveté to it, particularly when one considers how dreams can also be fantastically offensive (the curious whiteness to the sheikdom, in addition to or as part of the fumetti's colonialist campaign to imagine the exotic, and the absolutely ridiculous story the White Sheik tells Wanda on the boat, which she believes).
In The White Sheik, the dream and the reality constantly intercut with each other, which primarily functions to create a rather successful comedic effect. But the juxtaposition is also tasked to unveil an important dilemma. When Wanda realizes the truth about dream, she wakes up and reenter her reality as Ivan's wife, but one is left speculating whether marriage with Ivan, with his conventional ideas of family and women, indeed a dull man, is where Wanda's happiness finally starts. But on the other hand, we understand, just like Wanda now understands, that for all their glitz and glamour, dreams are nothing but mirage, illusion, sleight of hand, who promise not happiness but transitory and blissful oblivion that fends off quotidian sorrow and ennui. Forced to retreat to a banal reality from a fantastical dream made of platitude,Wanda, at the end of the day, is left in a position that is difficult to congratulate. As the couple flees their troubles and marches towards their now secured future, the tragedies lurking in the corners finally start to seep into the light core of the comedy. But Wanda isn't the unhappy one, let us not kid ourselves. She lives on in a wonderously woven dream. It is only us who are left to deal with the burns and jests of a waking life.
我并不了解费里尼,之前只看过一点八部半、半部卡比利亚和本片的开头。实际大银幕和小屏幕观感相差是很大的。这部片子的角色其实都挺有喜感,一看就会想笑但是还不会笑出来那种。最好的是费里尼的妻子,虽然这个片子里面只是出现了一小段,但只要一出现观众马上就会认同这个角色。另外直观感受费里尼是个神经质,那些构图,跟拍扭屁股(喜欢屁股的没有坏人)正常人拍不出来。看了他的手稿展出,画了很多和白酋长老婆一样的巨大的丰乳肥臀的女人,应该对他有很大影响吧。
伍迪极力推崇这部喜剧,在看的过程倒没有特别爆笑的段落,当然全程保持着一种喜感,他的幽默更偏于黑色幽默,有很多段落看了觉得非常讽刺,比如万念俱灰的女主下定决心跳河,结果那河水根本淹不死人,只是把自己搞的更加狼狈。这比刺激笑穴和抖机灵一类的喜剧就多了一层视角。
【意大利电影大师展】1. OMG这不是《开罗紫玫瑰》《爱在罗马》mix《纽约的一个雨天》吗!老头子竟然是费里尼的小迷弟!2. Cabiria的人物构思原来五年前就有了欸,这次影展的场次安排让她的出现成了有梗客串,全场会心一笑。3. 沙滩上的定格拍摄,空中的白酋长,怀里的杏仁糖,还有马车驶过50年代的大街小巷,处女作里就充斥着费式风趣与浪漫主义。4. 在影城偌大的荧幕前做一名沉浸黑白影像哭哭笑笑的观众,仿佛回到了上世纪的场景。没有手机,没有屏摄,没有爆米花,只有纯粹的电影。配乐响起,镜头拉远,FINE出现,大家一起疯狂鼓掌,太幸福了。
今天在中国电影资料馆看的4k修复版,比预想中好看!最后女主说:“相信我,我是清白无辜的,都怪这多舛的命运。”不过,哪有可能是无辜的。虽然是大团圆收尾,两人的婚姻不太能幸福,多半是从各自愧疚中走出后,故态复萌。
Giulietta客串卡比利亚!2020.10.24 没有以前看觉得那么好笑了,到感觉有点不耐烦了。哎
初见卡比利亚
把“谢赫”翻译成“酋长”或许有些不妥。刊物连载“摄影小说”大概是介于漫画和故事之间的体裁,吸引力大到能让新婚少妇出走,惹出一串滑稽故事。男女主角的气质很贴合年轻夫妇的角色,将社会规范与初历世事之间的挣扎和尴尬表达得很到位,妻子挂在口边的“我要回罗马”和丈夫口口声声的“家族荣誉”,最后都在夫妻情分中悄然化解。费里尼对喜剧元素的火候和剪辑控制得很好。
#重看# 3.5;“生活是一场梦”——可能,生活更是抛弃“安逸”现状宁愿沉浸梦境的逃避,是看清幻象的虚假愚蠢之后仍要面对现实的无奈,是在万念俱灰时仍被账单苦追的狼狈,是纵有心弃世亦无力赴死的荒唐,是面子和里子难以兼顾的仓皇,或许还是另一场「白酋长」戏剧的开始。结尾的归于平静并不认为是“和好”,另一个(悲剧)故事在画框外呼唤,所谓喜剧,总会蕴含着悲剧的因子。不少喜剧细节打点得很细致:酋长被桅杆击痛后的掌声仿佛是观众心声反射,警局报案报出名字时疯狂的打字声恰是内心无限惊恐的外化,无意间进入“演艺圈”提供灵光台词和片场混乱情况稍稍讽噱了一下。最难忘的当然是卡比利亚的惊鸿一现,出场即光芒四射,窥见日后创作成型的隐隐线索。
080724 名誉 喜剧
对于女人是追星冒险记,对于男人是新娘失踪记,新婚夫妇小两口双线并行的简单故事。前三分之一逐步铺垫延迟,最终渲染出白酋长的闪亮登场;破梦也转瞬即逝,反差得有些滑稽。后面总感觉稍微拖沓了点,不如开始时紧凑。
7。很傻很天真的妻子,家族荣耀至上的丈夫,打酱油的卡比莉亚(这角色和那片子里是一个人吧,都拿着标志性的伞)。
“我是无辜的纯洁的”“我也是”卡比利亚之无数个夜晚(字幕员怎么样了?
追星幻梦的半推半就与家族声誉的难以为继,几乎成了凌驾在新婚爱情上的最大矛盾。但这样的主题渗透到罗马的俚俗中,浑然释放俏皮可爱,甚至让人产生一种长辈视角,笑看欢闹。卡比利亚在午夜惊喜客串,当时谁想得到,五年后任她唱主角的电影能成为一代经典。白酋长太像从《西游记》里走出来的。@ 资料馆,4K修复,现场欢笑不少。
没有爱情的婚姻结合,男方只是看重在亲戚间的面子,妻子对其更像是给外人欣赏的照片;女方沉溺在缥缈虚幻的爱情想象中,一如既往遇到了费里尼式骗子,最后漫步入教堂和「你就是我的白酋长」如同即将上砧板的肉猪般破罐破摔(配合诡异的配乐)。
“生活是一场梦。但有时那梦是个无底洞。”……一位叫旺达的新娘,落跑新娘。出走虽有其天真幻想的个性使然,但意式家庭宗教传统的规矩套子也是重要诱因,费里尼并没有回避这一点。只是他通过交叉叙事隐形比较,以外景地拍摄现场白酋长的轻浮惧内缺乏担当等一系列偶像坍塌的负面行径反衬出婚庆这边的家族亲戚们的更能善解人意,含蓄实现了厚此薄彼之目的与推崇传统之主题。只是总体而言虽有喜闻乐见的意式喜剧风格的包装修饰,这主题表达的说教味道与时代局限还是略重。而且由拍电影的方式去贬讽了电影行业容易幻象破灭?似乎难以自恰。三星半。https://www.douban.com/people/hitchitsch/status/3076436649/
马戏团之夜,在罗马,出走之前的卡比利亚,追问向晚的穹苍。
原来《卡比利亚之夜》是早有预谋的
2.5。不喜歡這結局⋯ 《卡比莉亞之夜》的由來。
费里尼真有意思,这不活脱脱追星少女梦碎,黯然嫁人嘛。
费德里科·费里尼的第二部导演作品,安东尼奥尼还参与了编剧。 影片嘲讽了人们对幻影的迷恋,某些场景仍有新手的笨拙痕迹,但整部影片充满温情的自然色彩。1977年的美国片《世界上最伟大的情人》以及伍迪·艾伦的《开罗的紫玫瑰》均可以追溯到本片。总的来说比第一部电影要好看,进步不少。
【艺海剧院 4K修复版】费里尼真正意义上的处女作,安东尼奥尼参与编剧。1.笑中带泪、悲里渗喜的精彩讽刺喜剧,执迷于追星梦的花痴天真少女与懦弱、为家族亲戚与名誉面子而神经衰弱的丈夫间的故事。2.费费典型母题尽在其中:花心男/骗子与痴情女、元电影(片场戏中戏亦与倒二作[访谈录]遥相呼应)、马戏团与小丑、海滩、悬在半空的人(高秋千上的白酋长),还有梦与现实的相生关系(“生活是一场梦”)。3.玛西娜出场的一刻,恍若照亮了黑夜,勾连[卡比利亚之夜],让流浪艺人表演喷火戏法抚慰伤心的伊万,她自己也满怀欣悦与好奇地凝望着转瞬即逝的火焰,令人动容。4.男女主演无可挑剔,布鲁内拉·博沃(《米兰奇迹》)实在美丽。5.虚焦晃动的信(头晕),帆杆撞头-戏院鼓掌的反讽剪辑,震耳打字的表现性声响,诀别电话时抬头看到的骷髅标志。(9.0/10)
8-12-2007 4:00pm hkfa