The White Sheik

Through the course of her devastating awakening, it’s easy to feel bad for Wanda. “Life is a dream,” she dejectedly concedes, summarizing the core of Fellini’s fancy, “but sometimes a dream is a bottomless pit.” On the other hand, as enacted by high-tension Trieste, who had little prior acting experience, as opposed to Bovo, who had the year prior appeared in Vittorio De Sica’s thematically comparable Miracle in Milan, Ivan’s plight is equally tragic, albeit less heartbreaking.

A comic fable of mass-produced fantasy and fanatical devotion.

Antonioni would expand this Roman caprice with La Signora Senza Camelie the following year, Federico Fellini here envisions the heroine’s trajectory (mouse to harem girl and back) as warm Flaubertian satire.