To Rome With Love’s Use of the Fellini Blueprint

As one of the most maligned of Woody Allen’s past ten years of back to back films (a feat he has sustained since he began his career, and one that rarely gets enough credit), 2012’s To Rome With Love received an especial backlash of late after both Ellen Page and Greta Gerwig–two of the film’s stars–came forward to renounce ever having worked with Allen (those pesky sexual abuse allegations and all). For Page, that declaration came in November of 2017, when she made the statement, “I did a Woody Allen movie and it is the biggest regret of my career. I am ashamed I did this. I had yet to find my voice and was not who I am now and felt pressured, because ‘of course you have to say yes to this Woody Allen film.’ Ultimately, however, it is my choice what films I decide to do and I made the wrong choice. I made an awful mistake.”

Gerwig’s shunning of the director came in early 2018, as the flare-up of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements escalated, leading her to publicly respond to her collaboration by saying, “I would like to speak specifically to the Woody Allen question, which I have been asked about a couple of times recently… It is something that I take very seriously and have been thinking deeply about, and it has taken me time to gather my thoughts and say what I mean to say. I can only speak for myself and what I’ve come to is this: if I had known then what I know now, I would not have acted in the film. I have not worked for him again, and I will not work for him again.”

These severe scornings aside, To Rome With Love is actually among the more interesting and innovative storylines Allen has come up with (not just in the 10s, but in general)–one of said narratives being, naturally, a reinterpretation of Federico Fellini’s 1952 film, The White Sheik. And since it wouldn’t be an homage/love letter to Rome without some sort of Fellini incorporation, this only makes sense when taking into account Allen’s cinephilic (not pedophilic) nature. But before we get to the story of the newlyweds, we begin with a traffic director–a real life one named Pierluigi Marchionne that Allen just happened to see doing his job in the Piazza Venezia one day and decided to cast. It is he who threads the separate vignettes together by insisting, “I stand up here, and I see everything–all people. I see life! In this city, all is a story.” So it begins with one of those members of said life, Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti), a Roman who is asked for directions by American tourist Hayley (Alison Pill) to, what else, the Trevi Fountain (a landmark that, yes, Fellini truly immortalized with La Dolce Vita). Because Woody Allen is a cynic, he is also secretly a romantic, which is why Hayley and Michelangelo quickly strike up a rapport that turns to “summer lovin'” that turns to an engagement. This, naturally, means that Michelangelo’s parents not only want to meet Hayley, but also her parents, quintessential New York neurotics (read: Jewish), Jerry and Phyllis (Judy Davis). The former is a “retired” opera director while the latter is a psychiatrist who is always ready to give Jerry an assessment regarding his obvious love of failure. To add to the list of what Jerry instead calls “being ahead of his time,” he immediately falls in love with the voice of Michelangelo’s father, Giancarlo (Fabio Armiliato), a mortician by trade but an opera singer by shower. As Phyllis notes of Jerry’s obsessions with getting Giancarlo to take the stage–even if it means putting him in the shower in public–“‘Out of the box.’ That’s a very interesting choice of words. Listen to me, you’re retired. You equate retirement with death. Giancarlo’s an undertaker. He puts people in boxes, you wanna think out of the box.”

In keeping with the spirit of Fellini, Allen has always had a predilection toward the exploration of mortality, integrated throughout the narrative in both subtle and overt ways. Where the subtle is concerned, formerly average middle class Roman Leopoldo Pisanello’s (Roberto Benigni) existential breakdown near a graveyard/ruin before the paparazzi (let us also not forget La Dolce Vita coined this term with Paparazzo) unearth him talking to his driver is rife with the implication that life is as meaningless for celebrities as it is for normals, but at least celebrities have the means to better numb themselves to this fact–the one that leads us all to the same end. Allen also addresses the same grotesque swarming of the flashbulbs that La Dolce Vita‘s tabloid journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is all too familiar with as he covers the gossip and news of various nobodies in the form of actresses and members of the aristocracy. The cafe society (Allen has a film by this very name as well). Which is why Leopoldo’s segment is among the most surreal, as this utterly banal man is suddenly made famous and sought after simply because the paparazzi start following him around one day, for no legitimate reason.

To the point of magical realism, a vignette featuring a visiting architect of commercial real estate (a.k.a. shopping malls, which were still happening in 2012) named John (Alec Baldwin) finds him revisiting his old stomping grounds from thirty years ago in Trastevere. As he sits on a bench musing on the past, Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) stops to ask if he’s the John Foy, recognizing him solely because he himself is an aspiring architect living in Rome for the year with is girlfriend, Sally (Greta Gerwig). And well, because Jack is the John of the past, the one that the John of the present wishes he could make see the error of his ways with regard to Sally’s visiting friend, Monica (Ellen Page), he goes down the rabbit hole with him. Strange, how both the women who now rue working with Allen are part of the same thread of the story.

And then, of course, we have the most blatant show of reverence to the Roman maestro of cinema, Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) and Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi), the newlywed provincial couple visiting the city repurposed from Fellini’s characters, Ivan and Wanda. In town as a result of his uncles inviting him to potentially join in on the family business there, Antonio is a nervous wreck as Milly insists upon getting her hair done before they meet with his relatives to go to the Vatican (always the fucking Vatican in Rome). Because she is unaccustomed to Rome’s girth, she finds herself roaming aimlessly–evermore lost–giving Allen the opportunity to put his own twist on the story by incorporating his favorite trope: the prostitute. Anna (played with the comic genius Penelope Cruz doesn’t get praised for enough), who only came to the room she was instructed to (clearly, a classic case of mistaken identity), suddenly finds herself playing the part of Milly when Antonio’s aunts and uncles walk into his hotel room to find Anna with her hands all over him.

As each of the four Roman myths unfold, we find that Allen, regardless of basically only making the movie because “it was an opportunity to get the money to work quickly and from a single source [of financial backing]. So, it came together like that,” had seemingly been waiting his entire oeuvre to set a film against the tragicomic background (visually and emotionally) of the Eternal City–not to mention find an excuse for a collective musical sequence by the Spanish Steps that is no doubt a nod to a similarly bizarre, instrument-driven gathering in 8 1/2. It even seems he has a stronger affinity with the milieu, in terms of wielding it like a second skin to its characters, than he does with, say, Barcelona or Paris. Commenting on the other part of his process for coming up with the screenplay, Allen commented, “Ideas come to me… and then, I go and look at them, and many of them seem very unfunny and foolish to me, and I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I originally did it. But sometimes, there will be a little note written on a matchbook or a piece of paper that says, for example, ‘A man who can only sing in the shower,’ and it will occur to me, at the time, that it could make a funny story. That is what happened with this. There were some ideas in this movie that did come out of the notes that I had given myself, over the year.” That such a combination of sad and hilarious ideas would be set in Rome is only natural–for it is the source of all living dichotomies (and dead, for that matter–yet another dichotomy).

Despite the panning the movie received first from critics and then from its own actors, it is, unexpectedly, one of Allen’s best box office returns, serving as his fourth most lucrative feature. Fellini would probably appreciate the irony. Particularly if Allen had stuck with one of the two original titles, Bop Decameron and Nero Fiddles.