In the Flesh: Fellini Satyricon

A rich man, Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), holds a mock funeral for himself, pressuring his friends and hangers-on to mourn him as they would upon his death. A guest recounts the story of the Widow of Ephesus, a woman whose devotion to her dead husband is so legendary it outlives its own existence, compelling people to believe her own outlandish nested story, concocted to protect her new lover, of her husband’s body’s ascension. Who tells the story, and why do they tell it, and to whom? Earlier, we see Trimalchio recite the poetry of Lucretius and claim it as his own, bellowing “In this house, I am the poet!” when Eumolpus (Salvo Randone) points out his fraudulence. Yet Eumolpus, who professes to our protagonist Encolpius (Martin Potter) that money has corrupted and deadened Trimalchio, proves a hypocrite as well, reappearing later in the story as a fabulously wealthy merchant who in his will stipulates that any would-be heirs to his fortune must eat his raw flesh before witnesses, a strange echo of Trimalchio’s threat to throw him in an oven.

Again and again Satyricon takes us through stories within stories, and then through recreations of those same tales, or of others, as when Encolpius is thrown into a labyrinth and forced to play Theseus to a nameless warrior’s (Luigi Montefiori) minotaur. “I am no worthy Thesus,” he stammers, throwing down his weapon before his towering opponent. “I am only a student, and not fit for such great things.” Flesh falls short of legend. Reality disappoints. Even the film’s opening scene, a blistering tirade by Encolpius about his former lover Ascyltus (Hiram Keller), blows away like cobwebs when the two men find themselves in the same room together once again. Not even the stories we tell ourselves are sacrosanct or immutable. At one point Encolpius even attempts to rid himself of his homosexuality through torture after failing to pleasure a woman before an audience of onlookers, a refutation of everything he’s told us about himself through both words and actions. His lovemaking with the sorceress Oenothea (Donyale Luna) in the form of a voluptuous Earth Mother (uncredited actress) returns to some of humanity’s oldest and most primal myths about itself. The characters even look fairly frequently into the camera, not with a wink and a quip but to remind us of our commonality.

Satyricon is profoundly grounded in reality, both in its casual approach to the many modes of queerness in Roman society and in its casting practices, which range from real sex workers to bit actors and non-actors brought onto the production for their unusual looks. The film is replete with people who look overwhelmingly real, who are fat, wrinkled, visibly queer, and of many different backgrounds. It’s one of very few movies to depict with relative period accuracy the Black African nobility who were peers and trading partners of their Roman neighbors. Danilo Donati’s exquisite costumes range from the fanciful to the mundane, and his sets are among the finest in cinema, a clear inspiration for later work by such luminaries as Dante Feretti, Milena Canonero, and Derek Jarman, creating a tension between the larger than life settings and the realistic faces and bodies of the people who inhabit them. Only in the final shots is this tension resolved, as Fellini — like Petronius’s fragmented tale from which the film draws its name and inspiration — breaks his narrative mid-sentence to show us the characters’ likenesses painted on the ruins of some mighty structure, transfigured into echoes of the opening shot’s landscape of graffiti. Narrative and human life continue onward endlessly in an unbroken braid.