Friday, July
10, 2009
Fellini's "8 1/2" turned into "Nine"
the Broadway Musical,
becomes "NINE" the Film
THE ANNOTICO REPORT
As most know
Fellini arrived at the title "8 1/2" for the 9 productions he was involved
with, but deducted a 1/2 because he only co directed one production. The
title "Nine" was arrived at by taking 8 1/2 and adding 1/2 for the Musical
addition.
"NINE" is a musical that follows
the life of world famous fictional film director Guido Contini (Daniel
Day-Lewis), (but considered autobiographical of Federico Fellini
) as he reaches a creative and personal crisis of epic proportion, while
balancing the numerous women in his life including his wife (Marion
Cotillard), his mistress (Penelope Cruz), his film star muse
(Nicole Kidman), his confidant and costume designer (Judi Dench),
an American fashion journalist (Kate Hudson, Academy Award nominee),
the whore from his youth (Fergie, Grammy nominated singer ) and
his mother (Sophia Loren). The film is directed by Rob Marshall
(CHICAGO). The original 1982 Broadway production of "NINE", won five Tony
Awards including Best Musical.
8 1/2 is a 1963 film
directed by Italian director Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini,
Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni
as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director. Shot in black-and-white
by cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo,
The movie's title refers to the total
number of films Fellini had previously directed. These included six features,
two short segments, and a collaboration with another director, Alberto
Lattuada. The latter production accounted for a "half" film.
8 1/2
won two Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume
Design (black-and-white). Acknowledged as a highly influential classic[,
it was ranked 3rd best film of all time in a 2002 poll of film directors
conducted by the British Film Institute.
----------------------------
Nine
is a musical based on an Italian play by Mario Fratti inspired by Federico
Fellini's autobiographical film 81/2 . It focuses on film director Guido
Contini, savoring his most recent (and greatest) success but facing his
fortieth birthday and a midlife crisis blocking his creative impulses and
entangling him in a web of romantic difficulties in early-1960s Venice.
The original Broadway production
opened in 1982 and ran for 729 performances, starring Raul Julia. The musical
won five Tony Awards, including best musical, and has enjoyed a number
of revivals
---------------------------
Plot
Guido Contini, famous italian film
director, has turned forty and faces a double crises: he has to shoot a
film for which he can't write the script, and his wife of twenty years,
the film star Luisa del Forno, may be about to leave him if he can't pay
more attention to the marriage. As it turns out, it is the same crisis.
Luisa's efforts to talk to him seem
to be drowned out by voices in his head: voices of women in his life, speaking
through the walls of his memory, insistent, flirtatious, irresistable,
potent. Women speaking beyond words (Overture delle Donne). And
these are the women Guido has loved, and from whom he has derived the entire
vitality of a creative life, now as stalled as his marriage.
In an attempt to find some peace
and save the marriage, they go to a spa near Venice (Spa Music),
where they are immediately hunted down by the press with intrusive questions
about the marriage and -- something Guido had not told Luisa about -- his
imminent film project (Not Since Chaplin).
As Guido struggles to find a story
for his film, he becomes increasingly preoccupied -- his interior world
sometimes becoming indistinguishable from the objective world (Guido's
Song). His mistress Carla arrives in Venice, calling him from her lonely
hotel room (A Call from the Vatican), his producer Liliane La Fleur,
former vedette of the Folies Bergeres, insists he make a musical, an idea
which itself veers off into a feminine fantasy of extraordinary vividness
(The Script/Folies Bergeres). And all the while, Luisa watches,
the resilience of her love being consummed by anxiety for him and a gathering
dismay for their lives together (My Husband Makes Movies / Only With
You).
Guido's fugitive imagination, clutching
at women like straws, eventually plunges through the floor of the present
and into his own past where he encounters his mother, bathing a nine year
old boy -- the young Guido himself (Nine). The vision leads him
to re-encounter a glorious moment on a beach with Saraghina, the prostitute
and outcast to whom he went as a curious child , creeping out of his Catholic
boarding school St. Sebastian, to ask her to tell him about love. Her answer,
be yourself (Ti Voglio Bene / Be Italian), and the dance she taught
him on the sand echoes down to the forty-year old Guido as a talisman and
a terrible reminder of the consequences of that night -- punishment by
the nuns and rejection by his appalled mother (The Bells of St. Sebatian).
Unable to bear the incomprehensible dread of the adults, the little boy
runs back to the beach to find nothing but the sand and the wind -- an
image of the vanishing nature of love, and the cause of Guido Contini's
artistry and unanchored peril: a fugitive heart.
Back into the present, Guido is on
a beach once more. With him, Claudia Nardi, a film star, muse of his greatest
successes, who has flown in from Paris because he needs her. But this time
she doesn't want the role. He cannot fathom the rejection. He is enraged.
He fails to understand that Claudia loves him too, but wants him to love
her as a woman 'not a spirit' -- and he realizes too late that this was
the real reason she came -- in order to know. And now she does. He can't
love her that way. And she is in some way released to love him for what
he is, and never to hope for him again. Wryly she calls him "My charming
Casanova!" thereby involuntarily giving Guido the very inspiration he needs
and has always looked to her for. As Claudia lets him go with "Unusual
Way", Guido grasps the last straw of all -- a desperate, inspired movie
-- a 'spectacular in the vernacular' -- set on "The Grand Canal"
and cast with every woman in his life.
The improvised movie is a spectacular
collision between his real life and his creative one -- a film that is
as self-lacerating as it is cruel, during which Carla races onto the set
to announce her divorce and her delight that they can be married only to
be brutally rejected by Guido in his desperate fixation with the next set-up,
and which climaxes with Luisa, appalled and moved by his use of their intimacy
-- and even her words -- as a source for the film, finally detonating with
sadness and rage. Guido keeps the cameras rolling, capturing a scene of
utter desolation -- the women he loves, and Luisa who he loves above all,
littered like smashed porcelain across the frame of his hopelessly beautiful
failure of a film. "Cut. Print!"
The film is dead. The cast leaves.
They all leave. Carla, with "Simple" -- words from the articulate
broken heart, Claudia with a letter from Paris to say she has married,
and Luisa in a shattering exit from a marriage that has, as she says, been
'all of me' (Be On Your Own).
Guido is alone. "I Can't Make
This Movie" ascends into the scream of "Guido out in space with no
direction,' and he contemplates suicide. But, as the gun is at his head,
there is a final life-saving interruption -- from his nine year old self
(Getting Tall), in which the young Guido points out it is time to
move on. To grow up. And Guido surrenders the gun. As the women return
in a reprise of the Overture (Reprises), but this time to let him
go, only one is absent. Luisa. And Guido feels the aching void left by
the only woman he will ever love. In the 2003 Broadway production, as the
boy led the women off into his own future to the strains of "Be Italian",
Luisa stepped into the room on the final note, and Guido turned towards
her -- this time ready to listen.
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