This 16-minute contribution to the Zavattini-orchestrated omnibus film Love in the City/L’amore in città is what I like from fifties Fellini, the productive play between the neorealist impulse, the on-location depiction of Italian life in the streets, and Fellini’s own structural reworkings of that reality for symbolic, sentimental, or aesthetic ends. (See La Strada.) Here, A Marriage Agency falls into two parts. First, a reporter is guided by a gaggle of little children along an unrealistically long warren of corridors to the marriage agency of the title. Then, after the reporter invents an incredible story of a rich werewolf friend looking for a wife, the agency, equally incredibly, finds a prospective bride whom the reporter takes for a drive into the country. It’s at this point that this apparently light piece takes on an emotional (and social-critical depth) with its insight into the impoverished background of the woman involved. This is very nicely done — a fine, delicate balancing act on Fellini’s part.
by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
15 Oct 2007 1:19 PM | Submit Comment
