白酋长

Fellini’s official first feature film accorded with a solo credit as the director, THE WHITE SHEIK has a simple premise, a newly-wed couple from a small town arrive in Rome for their honeymoon, the starchy husband Ivan Cavalli (Trieste) arranges a full-day’s sight-seeing activities including an audience in front of the Holy Father in Vatican (thanks to the connections of his uncle, who works there), but the young bride Wanda (Bovo) has her own plan, visiting Rome for the very first time, she is tempted to seek out “the White Sheik”, the protagonist of a popular photo strip (“fumetto”) played by the actor Fernando Rivoli (Sordi, who makes a good fist with a faux-matinee idol impression from which sincerity is the last thing one can expect), and after sneaking out of their hotel, Wanda embarks on a one-day field trip with the fumetto’s production team near Rome, whereas a wrong-footed and clueless Ivan has to field his uncle’s family, from whom he must hide Wanda’s disappearance.

The film robustly freewheels between a girl's swooning abandon in an almost surreal surrounding (roistering troupers in costumes included) and a man’s piteous befuddlement and predicament, and Fellini clearly indulges in the revelry and hubbub. But Wanda’s untoward jollification will eventually shade into a letdown of reality check, when her jolly, affectionate idol’s charming facade starts to unravel, as a playacting actor, Fernando is reduced to a henpecked buffoon as soon as his chat-up with Wanda on a sailing boat finishes and his thickset wife appears, thus Wanda’s folly becomes a parable of a fangirl’s caprice, whose castle-in-the-air finality is extraordinarily foreshadowed by the White Sheik’s magic “swinging aloft” entrance. “Don’t meet your idol” is a fair warning to heed and a starstruck Bovo makes a meal of her transition from doe-eyed demureness to remorse-driven pietà in the aftermath of a dashed dream (even the Tiber river pulls her leg in the nadir).

As Ivan, Trieste often relies on gaucherie and a wide-eyed catatonia to soup up his mounting anguish and comedy of errors (and his parochial penchant and family honor first preoccupation), and his story is more of a prosaic romp compared with Wanda’s more quixotic, implausible and rowdy escapade, not until a cameo by Giulietta Masina as the naive prostitute Cabiria (a character will leave an inarticulate pathos in NIGHT OF CABIRIA, 5 years later), where she is distracted by a fire breather in the wee hours, does Fellini finally embellish a touch of surrealism to his misery.

The next morning, Wanda is granted a second chance to consecrate her new matrimony by the Pope, before being vouchsafed a second chance from her husband, to whom she admits that now he is her “white sheik”, but throughout Fellini’s arch manipulation (and the fact that Wanda retains her innocence whereas Ivan is actually not), it is hard to tell he is poking fun at the moral fable or being serious about it, anyhow, the influence of neorealism and earthy comedy still loom large, but Fellini's baroque trademark has already emerged to a jubilant effect in conjunction with Nino Rota’s majestically spellbound score.

referential entries: Fellini’s NIGHT OF CABIRIA (1957, 8.7/10); I VITELLONI (1953, 8.2/10).