New Faces In An Ancient Story

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31923, 26 February 1969, Page 10

New Faces In An Ancient Story

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) ROME.

Faces unfamiliar to filmgoers flit from orgy to orgy in the Italian director Federico Fellini’s new film, “Satyricon”—a story of ancient Roman decadence, with modern parallels.

The film is based on a 2000-year-old Latin novel by Caius Petronius, arbiter on the bawdy lecherous world of Roman high society under the Emperor Nero. Fellini, who has already filmed its modern equivalent in “La Dolce Vita” (1960), once thought of using stars such as Mae West, Danny Kaye, Groucho Mark, and Terence Stamp as the decadent Romans, writes Ernesto Mendoza, a Reuter’s correspondent.

But he has settled on a cast of virtual unknowns, including the owner of his favourite Rome restaurant and a 17-year-old British “Hippie,” neither of whom has acted before. ,

Explaining why, Fellini says he does not want his characters to be identified by the audience with previous roles they have played. “Casting is a very difficult task for me because I am forever undecided," says Fellini, the director of “La Strada” and “8(,” who first read “Satyricon” when he was a schoolboy. “To me, faces are more important than anything else. There is something in every face that I like. At night, when I close my eyes, I see faces. I am persecuted by faces.” Fellini looked in extraordinary places, including Rome’s slaughterhouse and food markets, for his cast Filming began last November, and will continue until May.

Heading the large cast are Martin Potter, a 24-year-old British stage and television actor, and an American, Hiram Keller, also 24, who last appeared in the controversial Broadway musical, “Hair.”

They play two students— Encolpius and Ascyltus—whose main interests in life are eating, drinking, and making love with-either sex. Max Born, a 17-year-old British “Hippie” who until recently was peddling tiny sculptures for a living, plays the role of Giton, a delicate, curly-haired youth who was the lover of both Encolpius and Ascyltus. But the oddest casting is that of Mario Romagnoli, the

bulky, 69-year-old owner of a restaurant near the Trevi fountain, where Fellini often dines. Fellini thought him perfectly fitted for the part of a lavish party-giver who was born a slave but became rieh by bedding with a long series of masters and mistresses.

Others in the cast are the Italian actress Lucia Bose (the estranged wife of the Spanish bullfighter, Luis Dominguin) and an American Negro fashion model, Donyale Luna, who will appear as a witch with the power to cure sexual impotence. The French actress, Capucine, joined the cast by accident when she called in to see Fellini and was immediately offered a role—that of the mistress of a perverted nobleman.

Fellini sees a striking similarity between ancient Roman and modern society. “Then, as now, we find ourselves confronting a society in the fullness of its splendour, but already with signs of a progressive breaking-up, a society where every religious, philosophical, ideological, and social belief has crumbled,” he says. “Encolpius and Ascyltus, two students who are half bourgeois provincials, half beatniks, such as we can see today on the Spanish steps in Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, and London, go from one adventure to another—even the most reckless—without the slightest remorse, with the natural innocence and splendid vitality of two young animals,” Fellini says. In “Satyricon”—his first costume picture and his first) full-length film in four years —Fellini is seeking to recapture the pagan spirit of

ancient Rome. It was a world of frantic pleasure—and cruelty. Merely for amusement, the Romans would slaughter hundreds of people in the Colosseum. For their entertainment, a slave would place his hand in a burning brazier and let it burn up to the arm—and die of pain. “What interests me is the pagan attitude to life before the coming of the Christian conscience," Fellini says. “One discovers this in Petronius. It is the chief thing that I will borrow from the text, which otherwise is only the fragments of a narrative.”

I Petronius, a former Roman I consul at Bithynia, was so • refined, witty, and unconI yentional that he became an ' intimate friend of Nero, who ' appointed him his “arbiter I of elegance.” ; Nero, with his jaded tastes, i considered nothing enjoyable or refined unless Petronius ■ had given his official blessing ■ to it. But Petronius soon fell i out of favour, and committed . suicide. i Historians believe that the ■ surviving texts of “Satyricon” ' are fragments from the . I fifteenth and sixteenth books i in a 20-volume work.