Voyage of the Damned Fools

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

AND THE SHIP SAILS ON Directed by Federico Fellini Screenplay by Federico Fellini and Tonino Guerra

The time is July 1914, the eve of World War I. The course the captain has plotted for the Gloria N. will take it close to the coastline of the Balkans, where at Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria has just been shot. However that event will resonate in modern history, it is, at least initially, no more than an incomprehensible inconvenience to this rather special company.

They are not your usual ship of fools, isolated for metaphorical purposes on the bounding main. Singers, conductors, impresarios, the titled and untitled rich, all are of the world of grand opera, and it is to make a grand, operatic gesture that they have gathered aboard the luxury liner. Edmea Tetua, by common consent the greatest singer of the age, has died, leaving instructions that her ashes are to be scattered off her native island in the Adriatic. And this resplendent collection of egocentrics and neurasthenics is here to see that her wish is fulfilled with due theatrical effect and a sufficiency of false emotion. As they see it, the death of one obscure archduke is inconsequential in comparison to the loss of the diva. Indeed, they have an archduke of their very own aboard, grossly overweight, of garbled sexuality, and attended by a large and mysterious retinue.

His girth and his group are emblematic of all the excesses of emotion and behavior that the gilded age has up to now permitted all of the Gloria N. 's passengers to indulge. In fact, the point Federico Fellini wants to make in the liveliest, funniest and most assured movie he has directed in years is that the time for these absurdities is over. From Sarajevo onward, he is saying, the only follies grand enough to impose themselves on the world's consciousness will be political, and far more menacing than these little cultural lunacies.

Fellini is not overly sentimental or insistent on this point; he is mostly having too much fun with the giddy life of the voyage. Much of the amusement has to do with unfortunate encounters between the foolish passengers, who like to believe that they have transcended the instinctual life, and the lower animal kingdom. There is, for example, the seagull that invades the dining salon, flapping everyone into hysteria. Then there is the matter of the Emir's pet rhinoceros, languishing in the hold and giving off a most unpleasant stench. Seasick, any reasonable person might suppose; lovesick, the opera crowd prefers to believe, bringing the beast into their own frame of reference. Would that the basso profundo could hypnotize the creature with his low tones as easily as he does the chicken from the galley, on which he demonstrates his powers.

Would that they could all stay the storm gathering around them as easily as they calm the savage breasts of the stokers in the boiler room, for whom they stage an impromptu concert. All of these events may be read as portents. The deck is soon crowded with Serbian refugees, some of them revolutionaries, and their presence brings down upon the Gloria N. an Austro-Hungarian battleship and a noisy climax to what can best be described as an exercise in, perhaps even a parody of, the opera buffa.

It is this style that gives Fellini's Ship its buoyancy. His actors play with the self-mocking sweep of the old-fashioned stage--one broad emotion at a time--and his staging has the kind of geometric naivete that one does not often encounter even at the opera these days. Best of all is the antique stagecraft, with cardboard ships gliding along a painted ocean, or a mechanically rocked lifeboat bobbing on a sea represented by rippling cloth. These devices disarm and delight.

Most important, they permit a director who in recent films like City of Women has seemed to be a man in desperate search of substance and style to bring both into charming, yet meaningful congruence. And the Ship Sails On has an old-masterly ease that places it among Federico Fellini's finest works.

--By Richard Schickel