Urban chaos is used as spectacle in Fellini's Roma, an ambivalent celebration of decay. The opulent rotting city of the film is indeed his own, with extras painted up as voracious citizens, and mock excavations, and a high-camp ecclesiastical fashion show that is also meant to be some sort of glittering, satirical comment on the old aristocracy, though it's hard to know exactly what the point is. Roma is an imperial gesture at documentary—a document about the city of Fellini's imagination, an autobiographical fantasy in which he plays ringmaster to the Roman circus…. The usual critical encomium "No one but Fellini could have made this movie" is certainly appropriate…. [Who] but Fellini would construct in a studio parts of the motorway circling Rome, in order to stage a traffic jam that would be a miracle of lashing rains and stalled cars under darkly beautiful skies? And in the middle of it there is another false movie crew, pretending to be shooting what we see—the camera high above the congestion, with silky while plastic flapping around it, as if protecting a mikado. The conceits are becoming so ornate they're getting spooky. (pp. 25-6)

This ringmaster feels no need to relate to the circus people. Fellini is an unparalleled extrovert, even for a profession rich in extroversion; he is so extroverted he has abandoned interest in characters and is interested only in his own projections. He is at the center of the movie, played as a young man fresh from the provinces by a toothsome, lusciously handsome actor …, and then by himself, speaking in English—most of it dubbed—in this version. He interacts with no one; he is the only star, our guide, and, like many another guide, he often miscalculates our reactions, especially to his arch, mirthless anticlerical jokes. The ambience is least oppressive when he stages a forties vaudeville show—a return to the world of his early movies. Here his nostalgic caricatures aren't so cruelly limiting, and the performers briefly take over. Emotionally, Fellini obviously lives in the past; the modern scenes have no emotional tone and no precise observation—not even any new caricatures. One modern sequence—a sci-fi treatment of subway digs and the uncovering of a Roman villa, with frescoes that disappear as soon as the air from outside hits them—is so clumsily staged that we may become embarrassed for the Maestro, and particularly by the Sears, Roebuck quality of the frescoes. The tragedy of their disappearance is a blessing. The new elements in this film are the psychedelic use of sound—din, actually—to empty our heads and intensify our sensory impressions, and the semi-abstraction of several of the modern sequences: the torrents of rain falling on the movie company caught in traffic, the wind in the subway excavations, a horde of black-leather-jacketed, death-symbolizing motorcyclists speeding to an unknown destination, and so on. Some of these images are magisterial and marvelous, like a series of stormy Turners. If one could turn off the assaulting noise—a lethal mix of car horns and motors and gothic storms—these passages might be mysteriously exciting, though they go on too long. But whenever there's dialogue, or thought, the movie is fatuous…. Fellini appears to see himself as official greeter for the apocalypse; his uxorious welcoming smile is an emblem of emptiness. (pp. 26-7)