Simplistic Complexities

For the first few minutes of Orchestra Rehearsal it is as if the early, good Fellini had miraculously risen from the ashes of his self-indulgent, self-parodying, overblown and vacuous later works. A decrepit music copyist sets the scene for a symphonic rehearsal in a trecento oratory where several buried popes and bishops seem somehow to make the acoustics perfect, and where a TV crew is about to film the rehearsal. The atmosphere is vintage Fellini: the old fellow, an amateur actor and typical Fellinian oddball, is comfortably crotchety and eccentrically sensible; the oratory looks austerely authentic as photographed by the dependable Giuseppe Rotunno in rich yet restrained colors; the situation augurs well, what with the anachronistic presence of a television team and the promise of the last score by the wonderful Nino Rota, who died soon afterward. Considering the quality of the music, he might as well have died before.

The film’s interest certainly dies quickly, because the point—the contrast between an orderly but dead past and rebellious contemporary confusion—is soon made unpleasantly obvious. As each arriving musician praises or patronizes his particular instrument to the invisible television interviewer (Fellini’s voice), and does so in blatantly anthropomorphic terms; as, moreover, each player speaks with a different regional or snobbish accent, the suggestiveness of symbolism promptly yields to the predictability and constriction of allegory. To cap it all, the conductor is a dictatorial German, and the union delegate who causes considerable mischief, a Sardinian-like Berlinguer, the president of Italy’s CP.

JS

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John Simon

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For the first few minutes of Orchestra Rehearsal it is as if the early, good Fellini had miraculously risen from the ashes of his self-indulgent, self-parodying, overblown and vacuous later works. A decrepit music copyist sets the scene for a symphonic rehearsal in a trecento oratory where several buried popes and bishops seem somehow to make the acoustics perfect, and where a TV crew is about to film the rehearsal. The atmosphere is vintage Fellini: the old fellow, an amateur actor and typical Fellinian oddball, is comfortably crotchety and eccentrically sensible; the oratory looks austerely authentic as photographed by the dependable Giuseppe Rotunno in rich yet restrained colors; the situation augurs well, what with the anachronistic presence of a television team and the promise of the last score by the wonderful Nino Rota, who died soon afterward. Considering the quality of the music, he might as well have died before.

The film’s interest certainly dies quickly, because the point—the contrast between an orderly but dead past and rebellious contemporary confusion—is soon made unpleasantly obvious. As each arriving musician praises or patronizes his particular instrument to the invisible television interviewer (Fellini’s voice), and does so in blatantly anthropomorphic terms; as, moreover, each player speaks with a different regional or snobbish accent, the suggestiveness of symbolism promptly yields to the predictability and constriction of allegory. To cap it all, the conductor is a dictatorial German, and the union delegate who causes considerable mischief, a Sardinian-like Berlinguer, the president of Italy’s CP.