The film opens with a dream. A man is trapped in a traffic jam, sealed inside his car as gas fills the cabin and he chokes for air. He struggles, he panics, and then suddenly he is free — he climbs out of the car, spreads his arms, and floats up into the sky above the stalled traffic. Then a rope appears, and an unseen hand pulls him back down to earth. It is the opening of Federico Fellini’s 8½, and it is one of the most famous beginnings in the history of cinema. The man in the car is Marcello Mastroianni, playing Guido Anselmi, a film director who cannot make his next film. And the dream is not only Guido’s — it was Fellini’s too.
A Film About Not Being Able to Make a Film
Three years after La Dolce Vita had made him the most celebrated director in the world, Federico Fellini was stuck. He had a contract for a new film, a huge set already being built, and a crew waiting — and he had no idea what the film was about. Then, in a flash of inspiration now part of cinema legend, he realised that the block itself was the subject: he would make a film about a director who cannot make a film. It needed an actor the audience would follow into a maze of dreams and fantasies without losing the thread of the man at the centre. There was only one choice: Marcello Mastroianni.
The title was a joke of sorts: by Fellini’s own count, his eight full films and shorter works made this his eight-and-a-halfth. The film he made is, by common consent, one of the greatest ever made: a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about a director at a spa, surrounded by producers, a wife, a mistress, and the ghosts of his own past, trying to find something honest to say. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival. But its real triumph was something else: it turned a crisis into art, and it gave Mastroianni the role of his life.
The Dream in the Traffic Jam
The opening dream sets the terms of everything that follows. Guido is trapped in his car, and the traffic around him is frozen: passengers stare out of bus windows, and nobody moves to help. The air in the cabin thickens, and Guido gasps. Then he escapes, climbs onto the roof of the car, and rises into the sky, his coat flaring behind him like a cape. For a moment, he is free. Then the rope pulls him down, and he wakes in a spa, where a doctor is telling him to rest. For a moment, he had flown — and the rope had pulled him back.
Mastroianni plays much of the sequence with his back to the camera — a silhouette in his trademark fedora, a figure in a crowd of strangers. It is a daring choice for a star, to begin a film by hiding his face — but it is exactly right for Guido, a man who has lost himself. The fedora became the character’s signature, worn through the film like a disguise: a hat that says “I am in charge” when the man beneath it is anything but. In that opening dream, Fellini and Mastroianni tell us everything we need to know: this is a film about a man who wants to escape, and cannot, and who will spend the next two hours trying.
The Spa and the Men Who Want Answers
Guido has retreated to a spa to recover his health and his inspiration. Instead, he finds himself besieged. The producer wants to know what the film is about. The screenwriter wants a script. The journalists want a statement. His wife Luisa, played by Anouk Aimée, arrives and wants to know the truth about his life. His mistress Carla, played by Sandra Milo, arrives too, and wants the opposite. Everyone in Guido’s world wants something from him, and he has nothing to give them, because he does not know what his film is, or what his life is, or what he wants to say about either.
Mastroianni’s performance here is a masterclass in being overwhelmed without ever losing charm. He smiles, he deflects, he makes jokes, he promises answers he does not have, and all the while the panic rises behind his eyes. It is the same quality he brought to Marcello Rubini in La Dolce Vita — the man who watches his own life happening to him — but here it is deeper, sadder, and funnier. The spa, with its white corridors and hushed air, becomes a kind of purgatory, and Guido is a man doing penance for a sin he cannot name: the sin of having nothing to say.
The Women of His Life
If the men in Guido’s life want answers, the women want something harder to give: honesty. His wife Luisa is intelligent, wounded, and tired of being lied to; when she discovers that Carla is also at the spa, the humiliation is complete, and Anouk Aimée plays the moment with a cold dignity that makes Guido’s evasions look smaller than ever. Carla, his mistress, is warm and devoted — she loves him without illusions, and that is precisely what makes her dangerous, because she reminds him of everything he is trying to escape. And then there is Claudia, played by Claudia Cardinale, the beautiful film star who has come to play the lead in his unmade film. She is the Ideal Woman of his fantasies, the pure and honest figure he believes will save the picture — and, as he slowly realises, a real person with her own mind, who cannot be cast as a symbol.
Mastroianni’s scenes with these three women are the heart of the film. He does not play Guido as a seducer or a villain, but as a man who loves women and fails them, generous and selfish in the same breath, and who knows it. When Luisa confronts him, he does not fight back; he retreats into a smile, and the smile is the saddest thing in the film. Mastroianni was not imitating Fellini. He was giving him a mirror.
The Harem
The most famous sequence in 8½, after the opening dream, is the harem. Cornered by his wife and his mistress, Guido slips into a fantasy in which all the women of his life live together in a house where he is the master. They bathe him, as his grandmother once did, and spray him with powder, and for a moment he is a king, adored and obeyed. Then a rejected showgirl starts a rebellion, the women turn on him with harsh truths, and Guido, in comic desperation, literally whips them back into line. It is a scene of breathtaking audacity — funny, erotic, cruel, and sad, all at once — and it could only have worked with an actor who understood that Guido’s fantasy is not really about power. It is about a frightened man wishing, just for a moment, that the women in his life would stop asking him to be honest.
Mastroianni plays the harem sequence with a lightness that keeps it from becoming grotesque. He is delighted, then alarmed, then furious, and the shifts happen in seconds, as they do in dreams. The scene is a key to the whole film, because it shows us what Guido really wants: not a film, and not a woman, but a world in which he is loved without being judged. It is the wish of a child, and the film knows it — which is why the fantasy ends in a scolding, and why Guido wakes from it lonelier than before.
The Boy on the Beach
Beneath the fantasies and the farce, 8½ is a film about childhood. Guido’s memories keep pulling him back to the boy he was: a Catholic schoolboy, confused by sex and sin, and enchanted by Saraghina, the big-hearted prostitute who danced for the schoolboys on the beach and was punished for it. The childhood scenes are among the most tender in Fellini’s work, and they explain more about Guido than any of the adult scenes do. He is still that boy, really: a boy who was told that desire was a sin, who grew up to be a man who desires everything, and who has never resolved the contradiction.
Mastroianni does not play the boy — the young Guido is played by a child actor — but he carries the boy inside him in every scene. Watch his face when he remembers, or when he dreams: the weariness lifts, and for a moment he is young again, curious and hopeful. Guido is the fullest expression of the type Mastroianni had always played: men who had seen too much and still wanted more. The film is not really about a director who cannot make a film. It is about a man who cannot grow up, and who finally understands that he does not have to.
The Ending That Almost Wasn’t
The ending of 8½ is one of the most joyful in all of cinema, and it almost did not happen. Fellini first shot a darker conclusion, filmed in September 1962, in which Guido and Luisa sit together in the restaurant car of a train bound for Rome as the train enters a tunnel. It was sombre, beautiful, and wrong. On the advice of his co-writer Tullio Pinelli, Fellini replaced it with the ending we know: a circus procession, led by a young Guido, in which the men and women of Guido’s life climb onto the unfinished rocket-ship set on the beach, join hands, and circle round in a ring, with Guido and Luisa joining them last, while Nino Rota’s circus marches play.
The ending solves nothing, and that is its genius. Guido’s film is never made, his marriage is not repaired, and his questions are not answered. What happens instead is simpler and stranger: he accepts the people in his life, and he joins their dance. Carla tells him that he cannot do without the people in his life, and for once he listens. Mastroianni’s face in the final moments — tired, smiling, finally at peace — is the payoff for everything that came before. He does not triumph. He surrenders, gracefully, and in surrendering he finds the film he could not make: a film about accepting life as it is, and loving it anyway.
The Hat, the Man, the Mirror
When people talk about 8½, they talk about Fellini, and rightly so. But the film belongs to Mastroianni as well, because without him it would have been a clever exercise instead of a human story. He is Fellini’s alter ego — the director’s stand-in, his mirror — and he plays the role with a generosity that is easy to miss. He never tries to make Guido more heroic than he is. He simply is Guido: charming, cowardly, funny, sad, and, in the end, wise enough to know that he does not know. It is one of the great screen performances, and one of the most selfless.
The film won two Academy Awards, for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design, from five nominations, and it has been ranked among the greatest films ever made. But its real legacy is simpler. It proved that a film about nothing — about a man who cannot make a film — could still be about everything: art, love, childhood, and the long business of becoming a person. And it proved that Marcello Mastroianni, the shy romantic who never wanted to be a star, was one of the greatest actors of his generation. He wore Fellini’s hat like a man who knew it was a disguise, and who was brave enough to let the audience see the man underneath.