A wall. Graffiti on the wall. A young man talking to the wall as if the wall were you, as if you had been standing here for two thousand years waiting for him to start. His name is Encolpius. He is beautiful and furious and his lover has been stolen and sold to an actor with a pig mask and he is going to get him back. The wall does not care. The wall has heard worse.

And then you are inside it.

Not inside the wall. Inside the film. Inside Rome. Inside a Rome that never existed, that no textbook described, that no Hollywood studio built, because Federico Fellini did not want to reconstruct the ancient world. He wanted to discover it the way you discover a planet. He wanted to land on it cold, with no briefing, no guidebook, no context, and walk through its streets the way a startled visitor walks through a city whose language he does not speak and whose customs he cannot read and whose faces look almost human but not quite. He called it science fiction of the past. He was not being clever. He was being precise.

The boy. Giton. Small, androgynous, soft-mouthed. Encolpius finds him at the theater performing in a play called “The Emperor’s Miracle” in which a slave’s hand is chopped off and replaced with a golden one. The audience howls. Encolpius storms the stage and takes Giton back. They walk through the Lupanare, the vast Roman brothel, where every alcove contains a body doing something to another body and the camera does not flinch because the camera is Fellini and Fellini does not flinch, Fellini walks through excess the way other people walk through rain, getting wet, not stopping.

They go home. They make love. It is one of the only tender scenes in the entire film, two bodies in a bed in a tenement, the city howling outside, and for a moment the howling stops and there is quiet and skin and breath.

Then Ascyltus appears. Whip crack. The rival. The vulgar one. The one who sold Giton in the first place and now wants him back. He wakes Encolpius with a lash and proposes they divide their property. He suggests they split Giton in half. It is a joke. It is not a joke. Giton chooses Ascyltus. Encolpius is alone. The tenement collapses in an earthquake. The film is twelve minutes old.

This is the rhythm. This is the only rhythm. Scenes arrive without preparation and end without resolution. Characters appear and vanish. You are deposited in a banquet and then on a ship and then in a desert and then in a labyrinth and then in a garden and then in a cave and then in a field of the dead and you do not know how you got from one to the next because the text the film is based on does not know either. Petronius wrote the Satyricon in the first century during the reign of Nero and most of it is lost. What survives is fragments. Bits and pieces. A feast here, a shipwreck there, a poem, a seduction, a funeral, a joke. Fellini honored the gaps. He did not connect the fragments. He filmed the space between them.

Trimalchio. The banquet. Trimalchio is a freed slave who became rich and now throws enormous dinners where the food is grotesque and the guests are grotesque and the entertainment is grotesque and everything is grotesque because Trimalchio cannot tell the difference between abundance and taste, which is to say Trimalchio is every powerful man in every era who mistakes scale for quality, and Fellini films him with an affection that makes you uneasy because you can tell that Fellini loves this monster, loves his vulgarity, loves his bad poetry, loves his wife Fortunata dancing in the steam, loves the roaring furnace of his kitchen, loves the ridiculous tomb he has built for himself. Fellini loves excess the way a priest loves sin: helplessly, with full knowledge.

The poet Eumolpus is there. Old, drunk, combative. He accuses Trimalchio of stealing verses from Lucretius. He is dragged to the kitchen furnace. He will return later in the film, on a boat, dying, writing a will that requires his heirs to eat his corpse. This is the plot. There is no plot. The plot is a series of things that happen to people who do not learn from them.

The ship. Lichas. A middle-aged pirate merchant delivering beautiful young men to the emperor. He wrestles Encolpius and falls in love with him. There is a wedding. Fellini films the wedding as if it were a hallucination inside a hallucination, lanterns swaying, the sea black, the faces painted, the ceremony binding two men in a bond that means nothing and means everything and the film does not comment because the film has no moral position. The film has no moral position because the ancient world had no moral position, or rather it had so many moral positions simultaneously that they canceled each other out and what remained was appetite.

The emperor is assassinated by his own galley slaves. The soldiers board the ship. Lichas is decapitated. His head bounces on the deck. Tryphaena, his wife, watches with satisfaction. The new Caesar parades through Rome with severed heads mounted on poles. Encolpius and Ascyltus escape. They find an abandoned villa. The owners have killed themselves to avoid the new regime. The slaves have been freed. A beautiful Black woman lies in the empty rooms and the two young men pursue her and spend the night. In the morning, nothing has changed. They move on.

The hermaphrodite. A child-god in a temple, pale, sacred, worshipped. Encolpius and Ascyltus and a mercenary kidnap it. They carry it into the desert. It dies of thirst. The most sacred thing in the film dies because nobody thought to bring water. This is not irony. This is how the sacred dies in every civilization: not by persecution but by carelessness, by people carrying it into the desert without provisions.

The labyrinth. Fellini invented this. Petronius did not write it. Encolpius is dressed as Theseus and pushed into a labyrinth to fight a Minotaur. The Minotaur is a handsome man in a costume. The fight is staged for the entertainment of a laughing crowd. Encolpius is not Theseus. He begs for his life. He is spared. As a reward he is given a beautiful woman, Ariadne, and he cannot perform. He is impotent. The crowd laughs. The myth has been hollowed out. The hero is a fraud. The monster is a man in a mask. The labyrinth is a joke. And Fellini, by inserting this scene, connects his fragmented adaptation to the oldest story structure in Western civilization and says: even this is broken.

The cure. Encolpius visits a garden of delights. He is whipped during a festival. Nothing works. A dwarf recommends a Black sorceress named Oenothea. She restores him. The restoration is brief. Ascyltus dies in the next scene, mysteriously, clawing at the ground like an animal, and Encolpius stands over his body and does not understand what has happened because nobody in this film understands what has happened because understanding is not available. Not in this Rome. Not in this film. Not in this century or any century.

Eumolpus is dead. His will is read aloud. He stipulates that his heirs must eat his flesh. A group of people gather around his body. Some of them kneel. Some of them begin to eat. This is the Eucharist before the Eucharist. This is Christianity’s foundational ritual performed in reverse, or performed in advance, or performed as the obscene joke it will one day be mistaken for or one day become, depending on where you stand, and where you stand in this film is nowhere, you are standing on fragments, you are standing on ruins, you are standing on a text that is mostly missing and a civilization that is mostly gone.

The film ends. Encolpius speaks. His face freezes. And then the camera pulls back and his face becomes a fresco on a crumbling wall. A painted figure. A fragment. Every character you have met for two hours is now a faded image on stone, eroded by weather, barely legible. They were alive. They were enormous. They were disgusting and tender and cruel and funny and they ate and fornicated and killed and danced and wrote bad poetry and stole hermaphrodites and begged for mercy in fake labyrinths and now they are paint on a wall and the wall is crumbling.

That is Fellini Satyricon.

A civilization filmed as if by visitors from the future who found the rubble and tried to guess what the living looked like. The faces too large. The colors too bright. The cruelty too casual. The tenderness too brief. Everything excessive and everything incomplete. Danilo Donati designed the sets and costumes as if decorating a dream about a place that never existed, and Giuseppe Rotunno photographed them in reds and blacks and golds that look like the inside of a furnace or the inside of a body. Nino Rota composed a score that borrows from no tradition because this Rome belongs to no tradition. It is Fellini’s Rome. It is a Rome pulled from the unconscious and projected onto a screen and then left to decay in front of your eyes for 129 minutes.

Fellini was fifty when he made this film. He had already made La Dolce Vita and 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits. He was famous. He was powerful. He could do whatever he wanted. What he wanted was to film the pre-Christian world as an alien landscape and then watch it crumble into frescoes, as if to say: your world too, everything you are living in, the empire you belong to and the appetites that drive it, will one day be a fragment on a wall, and someone will try to read it, and they will fail, and the failing will be the only honest response to what you were.

This is the peculiar thing. Not the excess. Not the nudity. Not the banquets or the severed heads or the impotence or the cannibalism. The peculiar thing is the ending. The frescoes. The crumbling. The realization that everything you just watched was already a ruin when you arrived, that the film was never showing you the past, it was showing you the future of the present, the wall your own face will one day be painted on, the paint already flaking.

A man farts rhythmically on a stage. A hermaphrodite dies of thirst. A poet’s corpse is eaten by his friends. A wall crumbles. There is laughter everywhere. There is laughter in every scene of this film, rising from corners, from offscreen, from the darkness behind the camera, from Fellini himself, who laughed at everything because laughing was the only response to a world that was always ending and never quite ended and always began again, somewhere else, as fragments, as ruins, as paint on a wall.

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Fellini Satyricon Director: Federico Fellini Country: Italy Year: 1969 Runtime: 129 minutes