[Satyricon] starts where Giulietta degli Spiriti left off, moving wholly into a world of dreams and visions, bigger and more bizarre even than the highly-coloured fantasies of Giulietta in full flight. The result should be impossible, utterly indigestible, but paradoxically it is not: one adjusts rapidly to accepting the extreme ornateness of the action (what is going on in front of the camera much more than how the camera records it) as a sort of norm, so that effects which even in Giulietta would have drawn attention to themselves as extraordinary and exceptional here seem hardly more remarkable in themselves than a dead metaphor in everyday speech….

Charm and grace are not particularly Fellinian qualities, and the last thing he ever is is a sophisticate. In a way this is his greatest strength. In all his films, though particularly of course those from La Dolce Vita on, it...