Presented in Venice in 1952, it was received with indifference, but it already contains many themes developed later by the great director
After a very dense decade of apprenticeship as a collaborator on the screenplays of masterpieces such as “Rome city open” or “Pais” by Rossellini or the great successes of Germi, Mattli and Lattuada (and the debut behind the camera shared with the latter, ” Lights of Variety “, 1950), thejust thirty-one Federico Fellini in 1952 he signed his first film entirely on his own: “Lo sheicco bianco”. The subject, written with Tullio Pinelli (and Michelangelo Antonioni) and co-written with Ennio Flaiano, had passed through the hands of several directors who wanted to make it before returning (as was right) to those of its author, who had transfused both his youth experience in the world of comics is, in a nutshell, that dimension suspended between reality and fantasy that would later become one of the main elements of his peculiar idea of putting into images.
the story of two young southern provincial spouses, Ivan (Leopoldo Trieste, voiced by Carletto Romano) and Wanda (Brunella Bovo, voiced by Rina Morelli) who leave their hometown for the capital for their honeymoon. In Rome, the former hopes that his influential uncle (Ugo Attanasio), a high Vatican personality with whom he has also organized a papal audience, can help him make a career; the second one, unbeknownst to her husband, would finally like to meet her idol, the actor Fernando Rivoli (Alberto Sordi), a fascinating star of photo novels famous for his character as the “White Sheikh”, with whom she has a correspondence as an admirer signing himself “Passionate Doll”. After introducing herself to the comic production house, Wanda follows the troupe to a set on the Roman coast where she finally meets the star, who even offers her to try her hand in a small role and takes advantage of the opportunity once more (as she has already done countless times) to indulge in an impromptu adventure with what for him is just one of the many infatuated readers.
Taking advantage of a break, Fernando manages to convince Wanda to take a short boat trip during which he tries to seduce her. But she does not allow herself to do so; and when she returns, she witnesses an unexpected scene of jealousy between the man (married) and her partner (Gina Mascetti), her myth collapses in front of her eyes in all the heavy mediocrity her. And when Ivan (who has in the meantime tried to medicate with his suspicious relatives the inexplicable absence of his bride, citing a temporary indisposition) he finds one of the letters of reply to Wanda from the “White Sheikh” and fears the idea of having to confess his flight. would discredit in the eyes of his whole little world, at first he goes at night and hesitantly to the police station to report his disappearance anyway and then, wandering in desperation through the streets of Rome, he ends up meeting the sweet prostitutes Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) and Assunta (Jole Silvani), whom she innocently confides in. The next morning, despite the clumsy suicide attempt of his wife, who threw herself in vain at a low point of the Tiber and was recovered by Ivan in the hospital where he spent the night, the two managed to reach St. Peter’s Square for the coveted audience and things will (perhaps) return to normal.
Presented at the Venice Film Festival on September 6, 1952 and welcomed almost with indifference by contemporary audiences and critics, “The White Sheikh” shows off a post-neorealist grotesque pink comedy frame: Fellini divides the protagonists, thus duplicating the environments in which to exercise a mild social and cultural criticism (the world of the fairytale vulgarity of photo novels visited by Wanda, in which that of the machine-cinema maker of illusions fatally reverberates with an already disillusioned gaze; the bourgeois milieu, gossip and facade, in the presence of which Ivan can only be tragicomically unequal) and suspends the narration in an (unstable) balance between comedy and drama, obviously unbalancing the first on the majestic gigioneria of a very great and perfect Alberto Sordi and mitigating the second with the nocturnal interlude between Leopoldo Trieste and his wife Giulietta Masina (whose character throws practically the basis for the masterpiece “The nights of Cabiria”).
In fact, he likes to think of the film as a kind of dress rehearsal for the wonders to follow, as a container aware of themes later developed with more completeness (the autobiographical cot, the mythical relationship between city and province that will be central in the immediately following “I vitelloni”, the dream dimension, the ruthlessness of love relationships – a topic almost forgotten by Fellini’s exegetes of maturity, but always acidly present -, lying as a cornerstone of relationships that will lead the Mastroianni of “8” to define himself as “a liar with no more flair or talent” ); the internal logic of “The White Sheik” still responds to a transitory need for an “average product” (underlined by the lukewarm – a euphemism – reviews of the time) rather than to a true and conscious authorial drive; and a certain lack of cohesion between the individual parts which is always definitely noticeable.
But also undeniable that seventy years later and beyond its melancholy and powerful nature of “death at work” (the famous definition of Jean Cocteau to define the ideal crystallization of the image-cinema as testimony of the inexorable passage of Time), the film undeniably contains a essence of “then” (so that “Fellini becomes Fellini”, as the late Tullio Kezich wrote). With his demythologization of the “behind the scenes” already represented with chaotically circus and derisive nature of the spirit that should underlie the “artistic creation”; with the grotesque and caricatured physiognomy here mostly reserved for the surrounding characters; with the ability to lightly raise the objects to psychological completion of the protagonists (here the very high swing from which Sordi enters the scene with an unforgettable leap); with the intention of inscribing the story in an open and closed passage by two complementary definitions of Dream (“The real life is that of the dream”, the writer of the photo novels tells Wanda, but a final line reminds us that “sometimes the dream is a fatal abyss “); with the music of Nino Rota already “in tune” with the director’s feelings; with the interpretations alongside which one always sees the “routing” presence of Fellini (with the exception of his friend Sordi, who was left to some extent more free to improvise and juggle), “The White Sheikh” really the non-masterpiece destined to weigh on the fate of the subsequent ones (all, none excluded).
September 8, 2022 (change September 8, 2022 | 10:03 am)
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