Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
After his young lover, Gitone, leaves him for another man, Encolpio decides to kill himself, but a sudden earthquake destroys his home before he has a chance to do so. Now wandering around Rome in the time of Nero, Encolpio encounters one bizarre and surreal scene after another.
Fellini's Satyricon is a singular, hallucinatory fever dream — one of cinema's most audacious and genuinely alien works. Its cinematography is extraordinary: painterly, saturated compositions that evoke crumbling frescoes and decadent excess, shot by Giuseppe Rotunno with remarkable invention. Its novelty is equally exceptional; no other film feels quite like this fragmented procession of pagan tableaux, deliberately dreamlike and anti-narrative. Acting is serviceable within the intentionally stylized, distanced mode Fellini demands. However, the plot — such as it is — is deliberately episodic to the point of near-incoherence, which is partly the point but still functions as a weakness in conventional terms. The ending, abrupt and unresolved (characters literally turning into stone fresco), is thematically consistent but dramatically unsatisfying for many viewers, earning a below-average mark on pure narrative closure.