I vitelloni doesn’t have an English language title because it’s untranslatable. Wikipedia suggests The Bullocks or The Layabouts and the subtitles on this restored version (on MUBI UK) uses ‘young bucks’, which is appropriate. Five young lads are bored in Rimini (co-writer and director Frederico Fellini’s home town) and do what young lads do (probably) everywhere: dream of a better life through self-entitlement. It is also strikingly Italian: Fausto (Franco Fabrizzi) (a ‘ladies man’ in the terminology of the ’50s) is already 30-years of age and finds himself, at the start of the film, in a ‘shotgun’ wedding’; Alberto (Alberto Sordi) readily weeps about the grief his sister gives their mother.
Only the intermittent narrator, Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi), seems to have his head screwed on but even he lies to his sister (to whom Fausto is married) about his mate’s infidelities; though it’s clear the deception of his sibling is as much to protect her as his friend. Such was the sexual politics of the time.
Fellini’s start in cinema was as a scriptwriter for neo-realist classics Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945) and Paisan (Paisà, 1946). Neo-realism was over by the 1950s but the influence is still evident in this film in the ordinary settings and ordinary characters. However, Fellini’s master of camera placement, particularly in crowd scenes, scream artifice rather than the ‘slice of life’ evident in, for example, Bicycle Thieves. The ballroom scene, for example, is a consummate masterclass in shooting masses of people coherently. Weaker filmmakers would use a montage including extreme long shots of the dancing mob and medium shots of legs in movement and so on. Fellini, too, uses montage but also has the camera moving through the mass and managing to artfully frame the characters at the same time. The effect is to give energy the portrayal of the scene to show how much fun everyone is having.
To describe shots as ‘poetic’ can be obfuscating, however the scene at the beach where the protagonists stare into the distance (image at top) has a melancholy that not even the characters seem to be particularly aware of. Hence it is poetic as the image has more to offer than what at first meets the eye. Similarly, the wind swept, littered, deserted squares (something of a characteristic of Fellini’s films) give a sense of desperation that has an existential edge; this was particularly the case in La Strada (1954), one of his most famous films, when Gelsomina (Giulietta Massina) is trying to escape from her ‘husband’.
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