By Edwin Gilson
Dancing in the fog - 1hr 30mins
When I close my eyes and think of evocative film scenes, I see thick fog...and a group of teenage boys dancing like nobody is watching.
They waltz around a courtyard to slow swing music, some with make-believe female partners, others content to lose themselves in solo revelries. It is a moment stuck in time and one of great poignancy - especially considering what has gone before in the film.
One of the recurring themes of Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1973) is desire, and specifically that of mid-teen males. Much of the film focuses on a lovable band of rapscallions as they mess around at school, pine after the glamorous town heartthrob known as S'il Vous Plait and conceal their masturbation habits from the local vicar at church confession.
Emblems of structured faith are ubiquitous in Fellini's film but for the young group religion is a straight-jacket, just another institution to be pushed against in search of true meaning, or at least what 14 and 15 year old boys consider to be true meaning; love, relationships, and perhaps most importantly to them, sex.
Their behaviour is often uproarious, not to mention inventive. In one scene that will linger long in the memory of anyone who has seen Amarcord, the ringleader of the teen miscreants urinates into a makeshift paper pipe from the back of the class. The liquid trickles to the front of the room, where his hapless friend is attempting to answer a complicated scientific equation on the blackboard. When he sees how he has been framed, his understated expression of surprise is priceless. To use modern parlance, it's absolutely top notch banter.
The boys exist in a largely male-based world. Their school is single sex and there don't seem to be many girls of their own age in their small hometown. They have never learnt how to co-exist with girls, let alone talk to them or build relationships. These factors conspire to render S'il Vous Plait the object of their collective longing, the vehicle onto which all their fledgling and as-yet-incomprehensible desires are projected.
For her part, S'il Vu Plait doesn't acknowledge the boys' tentative advances - even when main character Titta sits next to her in an otherwise empty cinema.
While the gang would kill to spend just 10 minutes in S'il Vu Plait's company, in the wider picture it doesn't really matter whether or not this pipe dream is ever fulfilled (spoiler: it's not).
It is certainly a valid argument that the female character should be given more of a voice in the movie rather than resembling a mere unattainable object, but that's a matter for a much more in-depth essay than this.
The boys are no more than a minimal distraction to her, and, anyway, they are on their own slow journeys of self-discovery in questions of sexuality.
As they glide serenely around the courtyard towards the end of the film, cloaked in fog, they are very much lost in their own imaginations and content to be that way.
The time will come for them to navigate their first romantic relationships, but, for the present, their behaviour is wholly representative of the shared mid-teen mindset; locked in fantasy and nothing more.
In the course of the film there is an unspoken acknowledgement of shared experience. These boys are thinking the same things, wanting the same things. While that often manifests itself in practical jokes or group yearning, in the fog scene we see a much more gentle side to the boys.
As he dances with an arm outstretched to a pretend partner, eyes closed, Titta asks: "Where are you, my love?"
Let's be honest, it's the kind of behaviour that might draw a raised eyebrow (at best) in a gang of teenage lads, where open expression is often quashed. And yet here, it's almost as though the fog offers them a smokescreen to the world and frees them of the burdens of gender expectations and emotional repression.
It's doubtful whether anyone else even notices Titta's rhetorical question. The boys are too caught up in their own unashamed thoughts of love, passion and tenderness.
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