MUBI

This is a hard film to get through the further it goes with its elaborate sets, costumes, and make-up of ancient Rome and its depiction of unhinged sexual desires and neurotic festivities. It’s hard to tell if there are any morals behind it, given that it’s a bizarre satire of the lavish excitement of the Roman classes. The two main characters, Encolpio and Ascilto, are so full of mischief, rebellion, and jealousy in their wild behavior, from vying for the love of a young boy to seducing exotic women to kidnapping a young demi-god for money to humiliating one another with their sexual achievements. It’s almost exhausting to see nothing but recklessness and perversions in the lives of these two young men, yet it captures the inner desire for sex and fun, which was likely embodying the era of the late 60s and early 70s when sex, drugs, and alcohol were becoming so widely embraced. The vibrant colors of the cinematography, the hairstyles, make-up, and costumes, and the shots of exotic deserts makes it so easy to be distracted from the reckless fun of ancient Rome that it makes one feel obsessed with living an era where the lavish and the sinful were so accepted. At times, it gets disgusting, such as the perverse nature of an old merchant who lusts for Encolpio or Encolpio being spanked with sticks by women while Ascilto has all the fun with the other women. It makes the film all the more unhinged in its depiction of erotic lusts and dream-like fantasies, yet it keeps you wanting to get to the end to see how all the mayhem and fun will resolve itself in its main characters’ fates. Despite how it may disgust viewers by its limitless erotic and chaotic mood, it can easily arouse a fantasy in our minds to live with no rules in an ancient time of the wild and the lavish. It’s so easy to take the fantasy as real without seeing any CGI effects because it’s all done through the dream-like style of Federico Fellini as he cuts from one episode to another of the young mens’ journeys in an authentic depiction of the ancient times with its colorful costumes, its vast deserts, and its stone walls that make it all the more believable and makes you want to live in it for all the rebellion and extravagance.

Spectacularly louche and episodic adventures in a sexually heightened Rome, with various assemblies of grotesquery and freakery, as our well-oiled heroes cavort through monumentally scaled sets towards… what? Nothing in particular, apart from eventual oblivion, but it has its charms along the way, namely Fellini’s bawdy imagination writ large. No great meaning to it and certainly not a conclusive whole, but Encolpio has plenty of fun with his! Nino Rota as ever captures the spirit of the piece.