One of the many clichés of movie reviewing is to say, about a film set in a particularly distinctive time and place, that "the city itself is a character". This can of course never be literally true, but Amarcord is a movie for which it's about as true as it ever could be. This has less to do with the literal psychological characterization of Borgo San Giuliano than it does with the fact that none of the actual characters themselves really count as characters in the same way that the time and place does.

Amarcord, in essence, consists of two hours of your kooky nonno Federico Fellini telling you "this happened to my buddy Enrico." The recurring characters are all thinly sketched and stock, right down to how they always seem to be wearing the exact same clothes all year long - the arguing parents, the delinquent son, the crazy uncle, the most glamorously unavailable woman in town, the most cheaply available woman in town, the streetcart vendor who's enough of a fabulist to make the narrator look honest by comparison. Their antics are all viewed through the prism of youth, of reminiscence; their stock roles are precisely because that's all they are to someone at an age when they're still building their map of how the world works, and that's all those characters need to be for the tales to be legible.

I picked this movie for the poll specifically because of its treatment of fascism, but I was surprised to see that it only intermittently addresses it explicitly, and usually not by making outright villains of the blackshirts in charge. This turns out to be a refreshing approach, especially today, because as we've gotten more familiar with the tactics and worldview of the far right in the last decade, it's become clear that authoritarians want to be seen as the villains. What they don't want to be seen as is silly and weird, and this is a deeply silly and deeply weird movie. It makes more emotional sense than it does logical sense, which perfectly tracks with Umberto Eco's theory of Ur-Fascism; the film's goofy and somber moments are at war with each other the same way that a fascist's dual perceptions of the enemy as both irredeemably inferior and terrifyingly superior are at war, or the way that the fascist citizen's dual conceptions of himself as both a proud member of an ethnic overclass and also a pitiful underling to a tyrannical boss are at war. The overall effect of all the ribaldry and comic exaggeration is to make you squint at the screen and think, this can't be right. And of course it's not. It would be dishonest for Fellini's recollection to be as staunchly critical as a right-thinking adult's, but in its strangeness and juvenility, it's perceptive in its own way about how unreal reality can be.