Life's a Lottery

A black cat ran across the lane in front of my car and disappeared into the hedgerow. "Oh, a lucky black cat," flitted across my mind and I thought no more of it. But no less than 14 hours later it happened again, a different black cat, with a collar this time. It shot across my bows and disappeared into a garden. Both cats were as black as the ace of spades. The second one happened at 5.30pm on Saturday, so I did what you would do - I hightailed it to the nearest newsagent, conveniently only 100 yards out of my way, and bought myself a lucky dip lottery ticket.*

I'm just back from seeing Fellini's 8 1/2. I see that it was released in 1963, so it must have already been a retrospective showing when I first saw it in 1967. I was 18 then, on a weekend trip to London with an older, more sophisticated friend, and I remember being almost overwhelmed by the strangeness, the exotica, of a foreign language film of such epic weirdness. I can't pretend to have enjoyed it very much. But the feelings engendered by it, even the very taste of who I was then, came flooding back, a most unsettling experience. By chance we watched La Dolce Vita in a different cinema a few weeks ago, again several decades after my first viewing, and it was fascinating, compelling in its portrait of a life lived purely superficially. There was the iconic sequence of a statue of the Blessed Virgin being airlifted by helicopter to the Vatican across Rome, hotly pursued by another helicopter full of paparazzi. 8 1/2 showed the same actor, Marcello Mastroianni, as a director struggling to finish his 9th movie in the grip of an exististential crisis. Fellini's films are compelling, thought-provoking, beautiful, crazy, and I think you have to be quite emotionally grounded to watch and enjoy them. It's nearly 50 years since I was 18, and leaving the cinema tonight I was very aware of some of the ways in which the years have changed me. I can still be wide eyed and easily beguiled, but there's a comfortable weightiness there too which is solid and confident. The real test will be if they show Giulietta of the Spirit. I remember coming out of that in the late 60s with my head in a spin, confused and unsettled by the director's fantastical vision, temporarily unsure of what was real in the cinema and outside it. Art, eh? It doesn't half take you out of yourself.

*I assume there is no need to spell out how this story finished.