#19 - 22⅘% of 8½

Fay Roberts’s fifth sonnet this year is inspired by Federico Fellini’s metatextual bit of sophistry, the Italian movie, 8½ (1963), written by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, and starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, and Claudia Cardinale. The first 31:30 made a strong impression…

Of all the tropes that I despise in art
it’s this one that can bore me in a trice:
that every single character, each part’s
despicable, with no redeeming slice

of virtue, humour, sweet humility,
affection for their friends, or even half
an ounce of kindness, unless they’re to be
discarded, punished, nameless, fatted calf.

And worse! Fellini knows he’s got a dud!
He makes the writer tell us to our face!
He hopes to smear his audience with crud,
to make us all complicit in this waste.

I’ve failed my challenge: watch each doled-out reel.
But I won’t play the voyeur for this heel.

The precise moment where I tapped out

If you have access to the BFI (which I won’t shortly because my free trial runs out), you can watch the 2:18 long, multilingual (but mostly Italian) movie here. Content warnings include: misogyny, xenophobia, toxic relationships, suffocation. Let us know what you thought if you’ve seen it! But please don’t try to tell me I’m a philistine for tapping out. That won’t go well.