Pre-First World War Ship of Fools, complete with that lazy storytelling device of a narrator-commentator speaking directly into the camera. With this, Federico Fellini advances himself as a serious candidate for that old drollery about so-and-so having forgotten more about making movies than most moviemakers will ever know. One thing he has plainly not forgotten, however, is to retain Giuseppe Rotunno as his cinematographer. A virtual fixture on the Fellini staff for the previous fifteen years, Rotunno has had much to do with the evolution of that strange and sealed-off environment which the director, like some Nero Wolfe-ian recluse among his orchids, is reluctant ever to leave anymore. Sunless, airless, but always clearly illuminated, albeit with the frostiness of moonlight, and infinitely spacious, the place has something in common with the world inside a View-Master Slide Viewer or inside the stuffed-animal displays at the Natural History Museum. And the control of the color tones attests to a tastefulness that Fellini, in other areas, is quite rightly not noted for. At whatever moment you might pinch yourself into paying attention, you are certain to see something beautiful: there is not much else to command such attention. Certainly not the ship's passengers, a collection of musical artists, connoisseurs, and patrons, escorting the ashes of a revered opera soprano to their final scattering place at sea. In a movie which at all times puts production values above human values, the people become little more than wax figures in a series of wax-museum tableaux: mere static elements of design, and hardly very stimulating companions for an extended sea voyage. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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