Dissonance

By F.R.

ORCHESTRA REHEARSAL Directed and Written by Federico Fellini

The burnt-out visions of the catastrophic Casanova behind him, Federico Fellini has returned to film making in a new guise. Orchestra Rehearsal, a 70-minute movie originally made for Italian television, marks Fellini's debut as a political artist. Perhaps the change was inevitable. This director's latent pessimism matches perfectly the gloomy social landscape of chaotic contemporary Italy. Or so one might hope. In Rehearsal, Fellini is so enthralled by his polemic that he forgets to let his imagination take flight. A film that should have been his equivalent to Godard's Weekend or Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy is instead a pedantic, if playfully illustrated, ideological chalktalk.

Fellini's crucial error is his movie's governing conceit. Rehearsal is built on a single, restrictive metaphor: the notion that a symphony orchestra can stand as a paradigm of society as a whole. Set entirely in a lovely 13th century oratory, the film ostensibly describes the rehearsal of an unnamed piece by the late film composer Nino Rota. But very quickly Fellini bends his dramatic situation into a cautionary tale about the dangers of anarchy. The musicians begin by goofing off and refusing to play together; then they break into open, violent revolt against their German conductor (played by Bald win Baas); finally they calm down and accept their leader's authority. The film's ominous finale shows the conductor barking Hitler-like commands to his now submissive charges. In other words, Fellini is making the conservative point that revolution is but a way station on the route to fascism.

Curiously, British Playwright Tom Stoppard has used the same metaphor to make essentially the same point in his Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), a 70-minute theater piece for actors and orchestra. Stoppard enlivened his schematic political lesson with wit, and so, at times, does Fellini. In the film's first half, a visiting TV documentary team interviews the musicians and gets a lively response. A flutist turns a cartwheel. A drummer attacks the piano as a "chatterbox." An insomniac trumpeter confides that with his instrument, "a clinker is death." Once anarchy takes hold, however, the idiosyncratic individuals are drowned out by the director's spectacle.

Just as Fellini gives us a German conductor-cum-dictator to hammer home his message, so he creates his supposedly symbolic revolution out of such literal-minded devices as graffiti, falling plaster and gunshots. Certainly the movie's point comes through loud and clear, but, as art, Orchestra Rehearsal is distressingly tone-deaf.

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