Old men tend to make art that is shallow, imitative of their earlier, better works, and which would never garner an ounce of praise were it not for their backlog of greater works somehow letting their patina still rub off.
In America, the best proof of this nostrum is the awarding of the lifetime Academy Award to a film director, or actor. Apparently, Europe is not immune to such worthless laurels either, for, in 1987, Federico Fellini's disastrously bad film Intervista won the Cannes Film Festival's Fortieth Anniversary Award and the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival.
In it, one can see many pastiches from earlier Fellini films, much as Ingmar Bergman cribbed ideas and scenes from his earlier masterpieces for his disastrously bad last film Saraband, the way Akira Kurosawa tossed random ideas together for Dreams, and the way Woody Allen has constantly reworked themes from his 1970s and 1980s great films into his last decade's worth of mostly mediocrities.
That said, even the worst of Allen's recent films, like The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion, were better than Intervista. Fellini might take some solace in the fact that Intervista is a better film than Bergman's incest-ridden Saraband, but it's a minor comfort, at best, and this shoddy film still falls well shy of even Dreams.
Fellini's worst critics have called his films, even the great ones, self-important, self-indulgent, meandering, pointless, etc., and it feels almost as if Fellini wanted to give them a film to finally justify their lowest and worst expectations. There really is no point to the film. It's ostensibly a film within a film within a film, but it's a rework of 8½ in that sense, save wholly lacking in anything new to say about Fellini or the art of filmmaking.
The premise is that a Japanese TV crew has come to interview Fellini on the set of a new film based upon Franz Kafka's disastrously bad, uncompleted, and semi-comic novel Amerika. Thus, we watch them pander to The Maestro, as he refers to himself, and then see him filming his own entrée into Cinecitta film studios a half century before.
Article comments
1 - Dave
Haven't seen "Dreams" yet. "Ran" was his last great film, I thought.
2 - Space
Don't be shallow, see it as a fun project done by the best european director ever. Not all students of film need developed characters to be intertained. There are a lot of news things to be seen in this film and the summerhouse scene with Mastroianni and Ekberg is sublime. He is just taking the piss.
3 - Dan Schneider
Piss in his own pot, thank you.