So this is a Fellini movie; the title apparently translates to “I remember” in some Italian dialect, and that’s what this is, a kind of dreamlike remembering of his youth in a village in 1930s Fascist Italy; it’s not a true biography/history, but is at least inspired by Fellini’s memories.

And so that shapes every element of the film: Structurally, it’s made up of little vignettes that tie together only loosely, but each of which has something that would make it memorable later; the characters aren’t real people, they’re people with all their fine details eroded away by memory into kind of broad caricatures; and the women are all sexualized in an adolescent way.

This is late Fellini — it’s from 1973, a decade after 8 1/2 and almost twenty years after La Strada. It seems like as his career went on, he had less interest in realism and story, and more on imagery and mood, because yeah, this is definitely a lot of the latter and basically none of the former.

Really, it reminds me a lot of Tarkovsky’s Mirror, which was itself an impressionistic film about the landscape of the director’s youth; the biggest difference between them is essentially the tonal shift between Russia and Italy, the one cold and stark and the other florid and colorful.

But so ultimately, I think that — as is maybe befitting a movie about nostalgic memory — this film is better when thinking about it later than it is while you’re watching it. Because while you’re watching it, the lack of narrative propulsion makes it hard to just keep on going; but afterward, you can remember the vivid settings and the memorable scenes and the kind of overall impressionistic mood of it all.