Fellini - Satyricon (The Degenerates) poster & wallpaper

Hiram Keller, Mario Romagnoli, Martin Potter

Trippy is as trippy does, even when you're talking about a movie set in ancient Rome. This 1969 Fellini opus was among the most visually arresting entries in a year when the psychedelic experience was...( read more  read more... ) trying to claw its way into every movie coming down the pike. But Fellini, in telling a negligible story about two young men tasting the various pleasures of Nero's hedonistic and priapic reign, aimed for images that jarred as well as seduced. He found humor in freakishness, contrasting beauty and ugliness while effortlessly passing judgment on the emptiness of a life devoted to sensation and personal freedom. More of a fever dream than a linear story, Satyricon crystallized the director's reputation as a visionary -- but may have trapped him into spending the rest of his career (with the exception of Amarcord) trying to top himself in reaching new levels of outrageousness.

SYNOPSIS:
Two friends in ancient Rome -- Encolpio (Martin Potter ) and Ascilto (Hiram Keller) -- fight over custody of the young Gitone (Max Born). Gitone ultimately chooses to live with Ascilito, throwing Econlipo's life into turmoil. But years later, when Encolpio reunites with Gitone, the two men plot to kidnap a demi-god and incur the wrath of the gods. Legendary auteur Federico Fellini directs this stylish search for redemption.

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22 critics

R, 2 hrs. 18 min.

Directed by: Federico Fellini

Release Date: August 3, 1969

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DVD Release Date: April 10, 2001

Stats: 396 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (396)

  • her69eyes
    August 9, 2009
    her69eyes
    Upon the release of "Fellini's Satyricon", it was chastised for being pretentious and without meaning. A film with the guts of this one is sure to draw such extreme reactions - how else, for instance, can you respond to albino hermaphrodite gods, dismemberments, and bizarre nonli...( read more)near forays into worlds from the open seas to a labyrinth with a minotaur? Although the film is clearly not as conventionally accessible as a few of Fellini's masterpieces, like "Nights of Cabiria", "Satyricon" is a film of such unrelenting innovation that you cannot help but sit in awe. Needless to say, this is ancient Rome as you've never seen it before.

    Providing a plot synopsis will not be of much use - the tone and structure of the film is indescribable on paper. But here is how it starts: the handsome, young Encolpio (Martin Potter) mourns the loss off his young boy lover, Gitone (Max Born), who is now with Ascilto (Hiram Keller). Encolpio learns that Ascilto sold Gitone to an actor named Vernacchio (Fanfulla). And so, Encolpio attends one of the actor's performances - it's a bizarre, lewd play with concludes with the hand of a peasant being chopped off. It must be noted that none of this looks like you must be imagining in your head - it's a world of completely unreal colors that make no sense in a conventional setting. Remember the dream sequence from Akira Kurosawa's "Kagemusha"? Imagine that sort of set design and color in the world of ancient Rome.

    In pre-Christian Rome, the value of human life is nonexistent. The film features much senseless violence and savagery. Attractive young boys are traded as goods between men - it's a world where passion seems only to stem from homosexuality and violence.

    The film is episodic, like most of Fellini's work, but the transitions between episodes are far from seamless. The film seems broken - we jump from place to place, entering worlds that seem to exist in different universes. By the time we reach the end, where Encolpio regains his sex drive from an evasive God in the form of a thick mother of the Earth, we can hardly gather how we came to this point. Fellini is our tour guide, and because of his masterful direction we are drawn along through the surreal fantasies without restraints.

    Although I wouldn't say it's quite the film that "La Dolce Vita" or "Nights of Cabiria" is, "Satyricon" is nevertheless a masterwork that is unlike anything made before it or since.
  • webalina
    May 8, 2008
    webalina
    I've torn between giving this five stars for the quality of the production and none for the perversion of it all. Set in Nero's Rome, it's more of a two-hour plus dream sequence than a film with any kind of story. Fellini fills this film with every type of surreal image and kind...( read more) of debauchery he could get away with in 1969 -- pedophilia and buggery, S&M and cannibalism, to name a few. And of course it has all the colorful freakish folks Fellini is famous for. Not for the faint of heart or morally pure. But if you're looking for something a little out of the ordinary, this might be the film for you. Themes of homoseual behavior throughout, and some graphically violent images, but no worse than most of the horror films released in the last 20 years.
  • lavenderfawn
    May 8, 2008
    lavenderfawn
    So weird, gay, but interesting. A very 'fantasy' feel to it with a heavy erotica air.
  • binky013
    March 20, 2007
    binky013
    Lots of great words have been applied to this one, including bizarre, grotesque, hedonistic, outrageous. These are all good words, and for sure the Rome depicted here gives much credence to the idea that lead-based paints and food and drink vessels made of lead possibly do signi...( read more)ficantly contribute to a breakdown of mental capacity.

    Okay, I'd like to throw this out to you, just because I haven't read much about this angle. Fellini is an Italian who's Italy born and bred, right? He chooses to "document" a period in his country's past, presenting it in a rather bizarre way. Actually, the word "insane" comes to mind -- he documents it in an insane way. Is Fellini in any way saying that his Italy -- the one he finds himself living in -- is a kind of product, partially at least, of the Italy portrayed in Satyricon? Historical roots, you know. I would certainly not dare to call this film a moving tribute to Fellini's motherland, of course, because it does seem to be not a little uncomplimentary of Nero's Italy. Unflattering or insulting or even damning? I don't know. Just some speculation. The whole running discussion of Roman and Greek poetry is tied into the history mix in an interesting way. Here's a thought provoking quote from the film to add to this idea of traditions revered and jeered:

    "I like to listen to Greek when I eat."

    Uh, would that be because the Greeks are such a refined entertainment that their beautiful poetry befits the occasion? Come on. Look at the mealtime scenes in this movie. What do you think?

    I'll tell you another thing which makes me wonder about this angle. When he shot I Vitelloni, Fellini seems to have avoided doing any location shooting on his home ground, Rimini, when portraying Rimini. He would choose sites elsewhere. This is the Rimini from which he apparently had to get away in order to make his life amount to anything. To stay there would have condemned him, perhaps, to the life of the vitelloni. So he feels this way about Rimini and he escapes to the "big city," to Rome. Only to find dissatisfaction with Rome? Who knows. Oh well, just more speculation from me.

    All of a sudden, I'm flashing on Spaghetti Westerns. Remember The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, right? "The beautiful" seems to be missing from the title, don't you think? I have an alternate title for Satyricon. How about The Bad and the Ugly? No good to be found, and certainly nothing beautiful.
  • gunnarfitz
    November 1, 2006
    gunnarfitz
    Hated it!!!!
  • mrchewbacca
    November 4, 2009
    mrchewbacca
    Visualmente cautivadora!
  • DrStrangeblog
    June 26, 2009
    DrStrangeblog
    TCM's Robert Osborne introduced this by saying, "There has never been a film like it before, or since." I suppose that's true - 'Satyricon' is less interested in telling a story than setting up lavish, twisted scenes of debauchery and gluttony. The budget must've been huge for ...( read more)the time, some stunning compositions, sets, costumes, and cast of thousands...well, hundreds anyway. Fellini makes some biting points about art vs. commerce and the downfall of culture within a self-destructive society of consumption and excess. However he's more interested in staging his surrealistic set-pieces, so the social commentary gets a little lost within his 2:15 overindulgence. The "incomplete" ending, just like in Petronius' writings and broken mosaics on palace walls, is brilliant though. An eyeful of a curio which is probably worth watching once for those intrigued.
  • ahhh1989
    May 13, 2009
    ahhh1989
    One of the most decadent and unforgettable masterpieces of cinema.
  • Arlecchino
    April 17, 2009
    Arlecchino
    Life in ancient Rome.
    Starts off absurd but grows on you.
  • Budgeburgess
    April 14, 2009
    Budgeburgess
    Possibly Fellini's most complex work, "Satyricon" is two hours of densely packed cinematographic action, with scarcely a plot in sight. Fellini likes his audience to work at understanding his art - "Satyricon" can be obtuse, can be baffling, can be downright disorienting, and it ...( read more)can take two or three viewings before you feel you have grasped what is happening. Two or three viewings? Is any film worth that level of study unless it's to get you marks in an end of term exam?

    Fellini's film is a re-telling of a masterpiece of Roman literature. "The Satyricon" ('satire', which may originally have been a dish containing many different choices of meat and fruits) was written around AD 61. Only fragments remain. It ridicules the bad taste and pretensions of Roman society, using foul language and lurid fascination with bodily function to attack high culture and art.

    Born in Marseilles, Gaius Petronius, author of "The Satyricon", was Emperor Nero's style guru, a man who partied to excess. The historian, Tacitus, described him as passing his days in sleep and nights in revelry, a man famous for indolence. He fell from favour and was forced to commit suicide. Nero, himself, was fascinated by theatre, music, and literature ... and by his own pretensions as an artist. Traditionally, his reign is seen as one of violence, and of rule by a highly unstable and fractious individual whose court was a living theatre of excess.

    Set near Naples, "Satyricon" has that small town, seaside setting beloved of Fellini. The story follows the romantic adventures of Encolpius ("in the groin") as he vies with his friend and rival, Ascyltos, for the affections of a beautiful young man called Giton. We are presented with a roller-coaster ride through a seemingly endless series of disjointed scenes of Roman life - a feast, a brothel, a country villa, a town house, a theatre, a picture gallery, the public baths, a ship, a shipwreck - the various characters making acerbic asides and observations on the state of the world and the foibles of its peoples.

    Petronius mixed language - the cultured classes speak in the proper Latin beloved of schoolmasters, but the poorer classes curse and swear, vulgarise their grammar, and generally mangle their declensions and conjugations. Fellini faithfully follows this style, deliberately recreating the gross and the vulgar.

    Petronius savagely pilloried his targets. Fellini maintains the pattern. The characters are grotesque. While Petronius's characters are real - his writing breathes with the vitality and reality of his world - Fellini's images are wholly surreal, the more so as he is holding up a 1900 year old mirror to the Italian and cultural world of his own day. Many of his images explore the pretensions and self-satisfaction of both the film maker and the film viewer (or reviewer).

    Fellini is regularly self-reflexive, using his own cinematography to comment on the state of contemporary cinema and analyse the process by which we view and understand the moving image. He can take the thinnest of plots and weave around it a surreal imagery which keeps you engrossed. Fellini was also fascinated by the nature of individualism, and in particular how individualism in the 20th century was so frequently expressed through materialism and possessions. So many of the possessions in "Satyricon" are actually slaves - is this Fellini commenting on how slavishly we follow fashion and aspire after each must-have possession, until we ourselves just become the playthings of the marketing industry?

    The film abounds in homoerotic images, though homosexuality for Fellini often appears synonymous with effeminacy. The sexual tensions of the film, however, satirise the depersonalising of sex - it is an act involving the body, but too often emotionally and cerebrally vacuous. Life is lived as a series of disjointed scenes - there is no flow, no purpose, it's simply remembered as highlights and underlined passages.

    There is something fundamentally empty about "Satyricon". It exposes too many human foibles as facades, too much of human life as insubstantial. Watching it two or three times - or more - you can become subject to crippling self-reflexivity, questioning your own pretensions and assumptions. Is it worth the effort? Well, it makes me laugh in places, it makes me gasp in others, and sometimes I just scratch my head. It's too obtuse to warrant five stars ... to give it three would be churlish.

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Critic Reviews

August 1, 2001
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

It is so much more ambitious and audacious than most of what we see today that simply as a reckless gesture, it shames these timid times. Films like this are a reminder of how machine-made and limited... full review

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