So this is a Fellini movie about a group of overgrown man-children in a smallish town in Italy. There’s the womanizer, the quiet nice guy, the artsy one, and the singer.

Each of them gets a moment where they take center stage — the artsy one in an unfortunate encounter with a visiting actor; the singer when he’s singing a couple of times — but the movie is really focused on the womanizer and the nice guy.

Because as the movie starts, the womanizer is flirting with a woman, and she’s shooting him down, and then we quickly learn that oh yeah he knocked up the nice guy’s sister, and totally knew that he had, but was still playing the field. This is of course 1953 in Italy, so nobody’s having that, and his dad threatens him very credibly with physical violence if they don’t get married, and so they get married.

You might think that perhaps a wedding that happens due to the threat of violence is unlikely to be a happy union, and — shocker — you’d be right. (So many of those puzzling misogynistic “old ball and chain” type things of the past make more sense when you realize that marriage was not necessarily a deliberate choice historically.)

So anyway, turns out that the womanizer is going to cheat on her after they got married; there’s an unconsummated flirting with a woman in a theatre (which also does that mid-twencen “no means yes” thing where she expresses her uninterest, leaves the theatre to get away from him, walks briskly away from him as he follows, enters a building to get away from him, but he keeps pursuing her and then oh hey turns out she was interested, and we see her later approach him suggestively), a consummated fling with a showgirl, and an extremely rejected bit of flirting/light assault with his boss’s wife, which gets him fired from his job in a way that he lies about.

At the beginning of this, the quiet one believes that his friend is innocent and these other people are trying to slander him (and even reassures his sister when she is upset about this); but by the end, it’s clear to him that oh yeah, this guy’s a total shitbird. And the sister is so overcome by his shitbirdiness that she flees the house; there’s a big search for her, with the fear that she’s killed herself… but in fact, she went to her father-in-law’s house. And when womanizer goes there to look for her, his dad gets his belt out and gives him a friggin’ walloping. Because of course, nothing straightens out a bad marriage like physical abuse, a well-known fact about the world.

At the end of the movie, that married couple is all made-up and good with each other (which I’m sure will last for at least 2-3 weeks), the nice guy leaves town for ambiguous reasons that kinda read like “sick of their bullshit,” and the other two (the narrator informs us) never amount to anything and live out all their days in that small town. Sucks to be them, I guess.

The thing about a movie that’s all about aimless people with pointless lives is that you can’t rely on the story to carry the movie. With Fellini’s later movies exploring this theme (like La Dolce Vita) he leans on a hyped-up style, the glamour of wealth, and the raw charisma of Marcello Mastroianni; but here the appeal is exactly the opposite — it’s a kind of grounded realism, a sense of a particular place and time, and the people who live there. It’s not really Italian neorealism, but it feels a lot closer than Fellini’s later work. On the whole, I prefer that later work, but still: This was an absorbing two hours despite a whole lot of not much going on, and it establishes a kind of atmosphere that was exactly what I was looking for.

Recommended for anyone looking for some midcentury Italian arthouse.