This seems like a remake of La Dolce Vita, in which the main character is in semi-crisis because his/her life is incoherent; experiences a crisis (Marcello's philosopher friend kills himself and his children, Guilietta discovers her husband's adultery and goes mad); and then responds to the crisis (Marcello by running from it and leading an existence more dissolute and humiliating than before, Guilietta by imaginatively freeing herself, at least to a degree; she unties the hands of the child-version of herself, and says goodbye peacefully enough to the spirit of her grandfather). The idea that it's a tired recycling of images and themes (cf. Ebert) seems to me wrong, although I haven't seen 81/2, which preceded it, in decades. It certainly has a structure, in which the elements of her incoherent life keep haunting her, such that the fantasy and the relatively real scenes are counterweights to each other. Guilietta Masini has much quiet dignity, and her lack of sexiness, her lack of joie de vivre, give the movie gravitas: she's not just another part of the auteur's erotic phantasmagoria. Certainly the movie takes patience, as its narrative pulse is not prominent.
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