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ROMA, the Federico Fellini-directed benchmark of the Italian New Wave, explores the city of Rome from several different perspectives, giving it a mystical life of its own that hangs in the balance between its rich history and its modern identity. With no real chronology, ROMA is a tapestry of bizarre scenes and familiar images (Fellini peppers the film with easily identifiable references to his earlier works) that blend together into a gorgeous visual carnival. Typical of Fellini, with the carnival comes a critique--and ROMA tears through the city's political and religious history, satirizing the Catholic church and various faces of Italian government from Renaissance times through Mussolini's reign and on into the 1960s. While the camera lavishes affectionately over Rome's art and architecture and is clearly a tribute to the Eternal City, most of the sets in the film are constructed, reinforcing Fellini's narrative imagination and keeping viewers caught in a perpetual contradiction between reality and fantasy, history and the present, fact and fiction.
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