He embarks on a personal voyage into memory and the past, and a reckoning with all the women he has loved.
Fellini’s masterpiece starts with cinema’s greatest and most disturbing dream sequence, all the more disquieting for being woven into a film in which dreams and fantasies are being manufactured as a way of escaping dreary reality. Mastroianni plays a film director, Guido Anselmi, who is evidently based on Fellini himself and clearly being created as a kind of therapeutic self-invention or self-mythologising. Guido has reached a moment of personal and creative crisis: he is blocked and production on his latest film has stalled. He embarks on a personal voyage into memory and the past, and a reckoning with all the women he has loved.