A Film Canon

With Variety Lights, neorealist wandering becomes a mobile, communal, utopian challenge to national, economic and even biological stratification, albeit in a self-consciously fantastic register whose most appropriate surrogate is cinema itself. To this end, Fellini and Lattuada poetically screen their theatrical troupe from the detritus and trauma of post-war Italy, bracketing poverty with a sublime, sentimental oblivion to its systemic or structural bases, until the sheer fact of restless, ceaseless movement itself generates a kind of surrogate social mobility (rather than the more explicit, literal aspirations of the protagonist): "I feel free. I can come here, go there, with no money, like a swallow." As a result, what little narrative exists takes place as an extended dance, not merely in the proliferation and variety of musical sequences (which occupy about half the film), but in Fellini's ability to imbue every movement with movement, transforming the troupe into a single, choreographed organism, gently, erotically shuddered by public transport, food and gossip.