Fellini is totally autobiographical but unproblematic: like those Renaissance painters who filled the walls and ceilings of innumerable villas and palaces with exuberant portraits of their mistresses and friends, barely disguised as figures of classical or biblical allegory.

Such reflections are brought to the fore by Fellini's latest film, Roma, which presents a dual portrait of the city and the cinéaste. The confrontation of these two runs as a unifying thread throughout the film. All great baroque art is a cry of defiance against death, and Rome, seen as a dying city eaten away from within, provokes Fellini to some of the most dazzling sequences of his career. The opening is deceptively idyllic: Rome as it is seen from the provinces…. Above all, it is a paradoxical mixture of past dignity and present temptation…. Fellini's handling of these sequences—recreating his Cinecittà epic as well as his Fascist newsreel … is an important clue to his stylistic methods in the later portions of the film, where even the most apparently direct passages of cinéma-vérité are in fact staged reconstructions.

Roma is a film without a story in the conventional sense, but it does move in a roughly chronological fashion from these memories of the distant past towards a vision of the present and premonitions of a possible future. But within this pattern it is the contrasts set up that are most important and give the film its impact. (p. 119)

Fellini captures with incredible precision the extravert side of Italian life, that of existence conceived as a show. Even the neo-realists failed to convey so powerfully the profound deception underlying this vivid surface. In their dimensions these scenes are no less impressive than the orgies of the Fellini-Satyricon in which the very vivacity of the participants carried such an undertone of death and decay. In Roma too one senses something of the same despair, for this is Rome on the brink of the futile Fascist adventure into war. The noise is there to cover a void, the eating is an excuse for ignoring the world outside. This is the Rome of Fellini's early experience…. (p. 120)

With a meticulous attention to detail … Fellini conveys his vision of the urban environment. This is far blacker, for the highway leads, as darkness falls, to a nightmare picture dominated by an accident that has left dead calves scattered over the road and a truck in flames and then to police brutality in an assault on youthful demonstrators. Parallel to this chaos above ground is the other contemporary piece which again begins disarmingly as cinéma-vérité. (p. 121)

Roma is a film of total maturity. Gone is the sentimentality of La strada, the pretension of La dolce vita, the self-conscious intellectualizing of '8 1/2'. Instead we find a filmmaker with full confidence in his own powers and an amused eye for his own foibles and those of his gallery of grotesques. His vision is pessimistic—pleasure is a prelude to death, the church and state are farcical or brutal, the present erodes the past without mercy or humanity—yet there is a great exhilaration in Fellini's virtuosity. Like '8 1/2' (where a critic shouts at Fellini-Mastroianni 'He has nothing to say!') Roma contains within itself the cliché judgements we might be tempted to use. If we find it too long, there is Anna Magnani saying 'Go home, Federico, it's late.' If we are tempted to literary allusion, there is the bespectacled intellectual rebuffed for his perpetual evocations of Proust. Roma is clearly Federico Fellini's masterpiece to date. Continually playing on our acceptance of the reality of his images and delighting us with startling innovations, Fellini displays to the full his supreme talents as storyteller and master of spectacle. (p. 122)