8½

There’s a line in Federico Fellini’s 8½ that stayed with me: “Happiness,” Guido says, “consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.”

I finally saw the film last night on the Criterion Channel. Long considered one of Fellini’s masterpieces, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as a film director on the verge of a nervous breakdown as he struggles to make his next picture. The story takes place largely in a spa town where Guido is being treated for exhaustion, but the real setting is his subconscious — a shifting, carnivalesque landscape where memory, fantasy, and artistic anxiety become indistinguishable.

I normally have little patience for stories about storytelling; they tend to collapse into self-involved puzzles that keep the audience at a distance. 8½ is different. It manages to be intimate and enthralling, even as it toys with, and often dismantles, the conventions of the art form it explores.

Part of its success is purely visual. The film is rapturously composed: every shot meticulously framed without feeling rigid. Fellini’s use of foreground and background, of bodies drifting in and out of the frame, gives the film a choreographic precision. Yet it never becomes self-conscious. It’s elegant when it needs to be, frenetic when it must be, always expressive of Guido’s inner life.

One brief scene at a train station captures this perfectly. Guido waits for his mistress, torn between the raw desire she evokes and the genuine love and respect he feels for his wife. Fellini places him off to the side, almost hiding behind a gate, while a massive steam-belching train fills the center of the frame — a one-eyed steel animal bearing down on him. When the passengers disembark and she is not among them, Guido looks relieved. Then the train pulls away, and there she is, dramatically overdressed and trailed by a porter lugging five enormous suitcases on the opposite platform. Guido’s face collapses into ambivalence. In a few seconds, Fellini gives us the entire moral geometry of Guido’s predicament.

Guido, and by extension Fellini, is torn between philosophical ambition and the demand to make films that both entertain and matter — pressures embodied by the critic Daumier, who shadows him while quoting great thinkers and analyzing his screenplay.

But the film’s deepest concern is how to find happiness, which requires telling the truth — especially to oneself. In the final scenes, Guido imagines crawling under the table and killing himself at a press conference, only to end up directing the very film he has been avoiding, surrounded by a disordered parade of the people in his life: past, present, real, imagined. They form a circle and begin a kind of ritual dance around an orchestra. The moment suggests that happiness lies not in clarity but in acceptance — of the entire ragtag collection of one’s life, the mistakes made, the pain inflicted, the contradictions that won’t resolve. Happiness, Guido concludes, is directing the circus rather than fleeing from it.

The most important character in this circus is his wife, Luisa. Grounded and intelligent, she is the only one who truly sees him, and the only one unwilling to indulge his evasions. She delivers the film’s sharpest line: “What could you ever teach strangers when you can't even tell the simplest truth to the ones closest to you?”

But is there such a thing as a “simple truth”? 8½ suggests not. Truth is layered, unstable and often obscured — and the hardest ones to admit are the ones we need to tell ourselves. Without that, we can’t tell the truth to anyone else.

And yet, paradoxically, artists — whose tools are artifice, exaggeration, and imagination — use deception to reveal emotional truth. Fellini turns this paradox into a lifelong project: the idea that truth is not a statement but a process of integration. Guido’s final dance is not clarity achieved but self-deception relinquished — the moment when the artist finally accepts the fullness of who he is, contradictions and all. 

He may not be 'happy' but he is now able to engage his life's work by beginning a new project. Every new film is a sort of re-birth - there's a scene at the end where the adult Guido is essentially re-birthed by all the women in his life -  and his half-made 9th movie, can now become his completed 9th. 

It's as close to happiness as he is able to come.