白酋长

Taxing as it might be for the audience to sympathize with Ivan Cavalli, when Wanda whispers to him at the end that she did not sin, and thus remains innocent, one is more or less prone to be touched by what seems to be a bitter-sweet reconciliation between a dreamy, starstruck young wife and a husband for whom the preservation of honor constitutes the singularly most important imperative: as Ivan smiles at Wanda's repentance and the camera zooms out, ending the movie with the couple running on the piazza to catch their appointment with the pope against the circusy music by Nino Rota, some might even be tempted to call it a happy ending.

Great movies attain their greatness not merely through brilliant technical details but also through a rare perspicuity that is sometimes mistaken for simplicity. Taken at face value, The White Sheik might just be a simple comedy: a couple travels to Rome for their honeymoon, whereupon the wife sneaks away to meet a Fumetti star, the White Sheik, and the husband left to cover up for her disappearance in front of his not so gullible family. When Wanda realizes, however, that the White Sheik in reality does not live up to his image, she recognizes one of the many faces of the "cruel fate," as she rightfully puts it, and commits suicide unsuccessfully, to later return to Ivan and their marriage. The first difficulty for a more discerning audience, nevertheless, lies in the hint of Flaubertine note in the story. Just Like Emma, Wanda is fed up with the philistines around her and is bedazzled by a dream that is largely a product of, as Vladimir Nabokov might put it, her poor taste as a philistine herself. And just like Emma, Wanda attempts at closing the gap between reality and dream by performing -- indeed acting out -- the latter. What can be "rosy" about this neorealistic, intensely farcical flick, however, is that the writers (Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano and Michelangelo Antonioni along with Fellini) never allowed Wanda to pass the point of no return, which makes possible her later reinitiation into the family (the uncle -- the patriarch, after sizing her up for a while, extends a warm embrace) as well as the movie's deceptively light-hearted tone.

In this way, Wanda, both in motivation and consequence, commits a lesser "crime" compared to Emma, and the way she is shielded from culpability -- as sanctioned by Ivan and the movie -- can be adequately attributed to her lack of ability to act/perform: she sneaks away only upon the White Sheik's invitation ("she doesn't know anyone in Rome," complains the unknowing Ivan), her little escapade prolonged only because the crew, without asking for consent, drives her to the countryside, 26 kilometers away from Rome, where they shoot the Fumetti. The movie never shows us how she gets a cameo on set, and when they sail out, the White Sheik's attempt at seducing her is sabotaged, not by her rejection, but by a timely swinging mast.

Innocent, impressionable, and immobile, Wanda is in many ways "coaxed" into a "crime" to which she herself is no less an accomplice but which only actualized unconsciously. The "crime" here is not so much her disloyalty to her husband (her runaway is more of a child's blunder than a woman's willful deceit) as the effect of her disappearance on the Cavalli's good name, a fact that Wanda and Ivan as petits-bourgeois are only too painfully aware of, in a particular locus where catholicism has its tight grip especially on the more provincial parts (where Ivan and Wanda comes from, as the movie implies) and minds. Upon reuniting with Wanda, Ivan mistakes her for having had sex with another man, but despite his agony, his imperative pervails when he apopletically demands her to put on the proper attire and go see the pope, as scheduled by his uncle, who, though having suspected that something fishy is going on, is still under the impression that Wanda is only sick in bed. The ruse, on Ivan's side, lives on, and Wanda quietly takes up a renewed role of accomplice in the cover up of her own "crime."

The dissolution of the "crime," a requisite for the farce to end, is then two-pronged: on one hand, through a miracle; on the other, through Wanda's passivity/innocence. Fellini does not intend this movie to carry much religious undertone, since the urgency of the couple's appointment with the pope derives from the fact that it is arranged by Ivan's uncle, who occupies a dubiously "important" office at Vatican, and not from the papacy itself. Such eagerness to oblige someone who lodges higher in the social stratum at the same time someone who assumes the role of the patriarch is, to be sure, both clearly presented and only worldly. The miracle we are talking about, nevertheless, is impossibly religious and hilarious. When Wanda attempts to commit suicide by the river, it turns out to be only ankle-deep, leaving Wanda baptized and, consequently, saved by an alerted passerby. This absolution arrives both as an aftermath and a herald to Wanda's innocence; the former, for Wanda has uphold her integrity by means of passivity; the latter, for the suicide allows Wanda to participate in the act of "redeeming" herself, and though her plan is botched, it nevertheless provides a pathway for her innocence to enter her consciousness: the will to repent can be, after all, a proverbial source of courage.

What gets even more interesting is how Fellini utilizes moments of deus ex machina to jack up the hilarity (as well as the folly) of circumstances. The first one is Wanda's foiled suicide. Here, we are witnessing a woman who spends most of her time on screen in paralysis finally acting on her own will (though ironically one leading to her own destruction) and spectacularly fails because of a deceptively deep river. The other, the mast that almost purposefully knocks on the White Sheik, provides a perfect situation in which Wanda's danger of being seduced dissipates on itself and hence, no decision is to be made and no morality jeopardized. Admittedly, what keeps a farce going is the constant frustration of plans and desires, whose consummation would invariably end the chase once and for all. It is in this way that we might object that these two instances were but exemplifications of the most fundamental comedy law. But the joke does not simply end there. In these two monumental moments, Wanda is metaphysically stranded on the island between paralysis and activity: when paralyzed, she is merely shoved around, in fact transacted hand to hand, by those who "have a plan;" and when she takes on her own plan, it is bluntly thwarted. Besieged both way, Wanda is trapped in a quandary not only relevant to the problematics of feminism but also to the problematics of modernity, where the efficacy of action as a myth, a strategy, and a performance is called to attention, if not already bankrupted.

Indeed, one laughs for many reasons when Wanda fails to drown. There's the classic irony of a person being denied of interacting with her circumstances meaningfully, and there's the affected, clumsy performance of suicide Brunella Bovo brilliantly adopts. The folly of innocence, when blended with the right amount of sentimentalism and poor taste, often leads to genuine and self-important emotional investment in actions that shrivel under the severity of intention. Almost as if she's too ill-at-ease with her newfound activity, at the same time too well informed of the burlesque, questinonably "exotic" and inexorably romantic adventure plot lines of the popular Fumetti, Wanda performs, with the tritest lines, her penitence when leaving a message for her husband, and, when she sees a painting of skull on the wall, is immediately inspired to stage her suicide, dictating instead of regrets her final words, in equally trite terms, to a concierge who appropriately couldn’t care less. To discuss the mawkish, indeed poor, theatricality of Wanda’s suicide is not, however, to discredit her genuine sorrow and her will to carry the deed out; it is precisely her seriousness, juxtaposed to the insignificance of her “crime,” that funds the hilarity of her failure, at the same time unsettling the audience with the disproportionate (self)punishment. Comical and sad at the same time, Wanda’s decision to die reveals not only the fact that she cannot act, but also the fact that she is trapped by clichés disseminated through popular culture that deprive her of any seriousness to be treated with.

Such insignificance of action, thoughts, and will, though the common language of comedy, nevertheless serves a wide array of purposes. For someone like Fellini, who’s invariably interested in the variety show, the circus, the farce, the spectacle, the outsider, and the weirdo, there is a wistful tenderness to the idea of performance (taken to its extreme forrm, freak shows). On the one hand, the clowns make themselves the punchline of the joke; on the other hand, there is the haunting mediocrity and dullness of, inevitably, life, that invades the space where laughters cannot penetrate. Whether one is consciously or unconsciously subscribing to a given script, whether one has an audience or not, one performs according to a larger order that more often than not strips one of idiosyncrasy, originality, and creation, contrary to how one might have appeared. There are many small ways we get to usurp such order, as Michel de Certeau rightfully points out, but the order remains the reference point, exerting the centripetal force that keeps one spinning on and on around something located outside of oneself. It is made clear to the audience that the urgency of Ivan's task of locating Wanda derives, at least partially, from the need to maintain a certain social order, the compliance with which creates a sense of security at the same time an illusion of dignity. Above all, one is also led to question Ivan's notion of love when his plan for the honeymoon precludes Wanda's participation. When Ivan is haplessly wandering in the metropolis, he is strained not as much by the prospect of losing his love as by the possibility of subverting, inadvertently, the social order upon which his family and his sense of self is founded, flourishes, and now going to flounder. When prompted, he shares the photos of Wanda with Calibria, identifying her as someone that is altogether an illusion of what Wanda appears to the rest of us: a straight A student and a beauty, which is, again, in line with his delusions about his partner from the very beginning, which is also the reason why he can never anticipate her leaving. He runs on and on, breathlessly, around a center point, like an obstinate pair of compasses, whose futility, both of action and love, is only predetermined by his circular trajectory that would never lead him anywhere.

Take the White Sheik, for another example. Alberto Sordi's excellent rendition of an haughty, debonair celebrity of a pulp production is inspired by an immemorial but stubborn idea of gallantry, complemented with equally trite speeches. Despite his suave mannerism, he remains just another Fellini's clown, who, by force of habit, continues to perform a character that is larger than life, whose later exposé again points to the precariousness of pretending what one isn't. But performance needs not be reduced to merely a lie. Fellini's sweetness is inherent in his treatment of performance as a dream as what dream in all truth is. It is spectacle fabricated and invented for us to behold and marvel at, an exit of life, which is easily blunted once our ability to fabricate and invent is dulled by the various orders we are initiated into. But it is also make-believe painstakingly created to pilfer the qualities of the reality: a dream would cease to be a dream if our attention is called to its nature as a fraud. To that extent, a dream also presents us with a paradox. Those who always wake up from it would find it more difficult to dream, and those who barely wakes up from it would no longer be able to distinguish the boundaries between fabrication and reality. The White Sheik and Wanda both belong to the latter, and there's almost a whiff of charming naïveté to it, particularly when one considers how dreams can also be fantastically offensive (the curious whiteness to the sheikdom, in addition to or as part of the fumetti's colonialist campaign to imagine the exotic, and the absolutely ridiculous story the White Sheik tells Wanda on the boat, which she believes).

In The White Sheik, the dream and the reality constantly intercut with each other, which primarily functions to create a rather successful comedic effect. But the juxtaposition is also tasked to unveil an important dilemma. When Wanda realizes the truth about dream, she wakes up and reenter her reality as Ivan's wife, but one is left speculating whether marriage with Ivan, with his conventional ideas of family and women, indeed a dull man, is where Wanda's happiness finally starts. But on the other hand, we understand, just like Wanda now understands, that for all their glitz and glamour, dreams are nothing but mirage, illusion, sleight of hand, who promise not happiness but transitory and blissful oblivion that fends off quotidian sorrow and ennui. Forced to retreat to a banal reality from a fantastical dream made of platitude,Wanda, at the end of the day, is left in a position that is difficult to congratulate. As the couple flees their troubles and marches towards their now secured future, the tragedies lurking in the corners finally start to seep into the light core of the comedy. But Wanda isn't the unhappy one, let us not kid ourselves. She lives on in a wonderously woven dream. It is only us who are left to deal with the burns and jests of a waking life.

Fellini’s official first feature film accorded with a solo credit as the director, THE WHITE SHEIK has a simple premise, a newly-wed couple from a small town arrive in Rome for their honeymoon, the starchy husband Ivan Cavalli (Trieste) arranges a full-day’s sight-seeing activities including an audience in front of the Holy Father in Vatican (thanks to the connections of his uncle, who works there), but the young bride Wanda (Bovo) has her own plan, visiting Rome for the very first time, she is tempted to seek out “the White Sheik”, the protagonist of a popular photo strip (“fumetto”) played by the actor Fernando Rivoli (Sordi, who makes a good fist with a faux-matinee idol impression from which sincerity is the last thing one can expect), and after sneaking out of their hotel, Wanda embarks on a one-day field trip with the fumetto’s production team near Rome, whereas a wrong-footed and clueless Ivan has to field his uncle’s family, from whom he must hide Wanda’s disappearance.

The film robustly freewheels between a girl's swooning abandon in an almost surreal surrounding (roistering troupers in costumes included) and a man’s piteous befuddlement and predicament, and Fellini clearly indulges in the revelry and hubbub. But Wanda’s untoward jollification will eventually shade into a letdown of reality check, when her jolly, affectionate idol’s charming facade starts to unravel, as a playacting actor, Fernando is reduced to a henpecked buffoon as soon as his chat-up with Wanda on a sailing boat finishes and his thickset wife appears, thus Wanda’s folly becomes a parable of a fangirl’s caprice, whose castle-in-the-air finality is extraordinarily foreshadowed by the White Sheik’s magic “swinging aloft” entrance. “Don’t meet your idol” is a fair warning to heed and a starstruck Bovo makes a meal of her transition from doe-eyed demureness to remorse-driven pietà in the aftermath of a dashed dream (even the Tiber river pulls her leg in the nadir).

As Ivan, Trieste often relies on gaucherie and a wide-eyed catatonia to soup up his mounting anguish and comedy of errors (and his parochial penchant and family honor first preoccupation), and his story is more of a prosaic romp compared with Wanda’s more quixotic, implausible and rowdy escapade, not until a cameo by Giulietta Masina as the naive prostitute Cabiria (a character will leave an inarticulate pathos in NIGHT OF CABIRIA, 5 years later), where she is distracted by a fire breather in the wee hours, does Fellini finally embellish a touch of surrealism to his misery.

The next morning, Wanda is granted a second chance to consecrate her new matrimony by the Pope, before being vouchsafed a second chance from her husband, to whom she admits that now he is her “white sheik”, but throughout Fellini’s arch manipulation (and the fact that Wanda retains her innocence whereas Ivan is actually not), it is hard to tell he is poking fun at the moral fable or being serious about it, anyhow, the influence of neorealism and earthy comedy still loom large, but Fellini's baroque trademark has already emerged to a jubilant effect in conjunction with Nino Rota’s majestically spellbound score.

referential entries: Fellini’s NIGHT OF CABIRIA (1957, 8.7/10); I VITELLONI (1953, 8.2/10).