Fellini’s late film is reminiscent in some ways of Östlund’s recent Grand Prix winner. A privileged group aboard an ocean liner, which will then run into difficulties as the conflict between the elite and the below decks comes to the fore. However, where Triangle of Sadness seeks to wreak a Swiftian chaos, Fellini’s satire is gentler and more tender. The characters on board his vessel are figures from the opera, who have come to cast the ashes of one of their own into the sea. These are strange creatures, some of them scarcely human, but their love of song redeems them. Many of the film’s most vibrant sequences occur via music, such as when the opera characters sing for the men who work in the boiler room, or join the dance of the Serbian refugees. Fellini is after all, a humanist as well as being a satirist. Whilst there is something rather arch and contrived about the film, there are also exquisite moments of what might be called cinema magic. These include the opening sequence, where historical footage collapses into the artifice of fiction, and another moment when the artifice is stripped away and the camera pulls out of the fiction to show the remarkable set constructed for the ocean liner. Fellini has often flirted, a la Pirandello, with the film within the film, the way that the cinema director is either conman or magician, depending on your perspective. En La Nave has an elegiac feel, its narrative constructed around a funeral, set on the eve of the First World War, with the world about to be transformed. The magician’s tricks will soon be swept away.
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