Ancient Rome: Student Encolpius (Martin Potter) is madly in love with
feminine loverboy Giton (Max Born), an affection his roommate Ascyltus
(Hiram Keller) shares though, & when Encolpius & Ascyltus decide
to part ways, Giton decides to stick with Ascyltus, To Encolpius's great
disappointment. To cope with his loss, he decides to take up company
with poet Eumolpus (Salvo Randone), who takes him to the enormously
tasteless & decadent feast of Trimalchio (Il Moro), celebrated
oblivious to the crumbling world around them. But after this night of
excess, Encolpius wakes up to reality again - in chains & brought
aboard a ship to be sent - as slave - to the young emperor ... but at
least, Encolpius meets Giton & Ascyltus again, who were enslaved as
well. However, they are soon freed, as the young emperor is no more,
& the slaves are left to go wherever they please - all but Giton,
who is kept by the commander as his own personal loverboy. So Encolpius
& Ascyltus team up again & encounter the mansion of a couple
(Joseph Wheeler, Lucia Bose) who has comitted suicide but has left
behind a slavegirl they have a passionate threeesome with. On their
further way they encounter a nymphomaniac woman (Sibilla Sedat) whom
Ascyltus gives satisfaction, & a hermaphrodite, whom they help a
thief to steal. But as they do not manage to keep the hermaphrodite
alive, the thief tries to kill them both in a fit of rage but is killed
himself. Then Encolpius is thrown into the labyrinth though, where he
has to battle the minotaur (George Eastman), but throws himself at his
mercy explaining he is no warrior & not skilled in the arts of war
... at which point everything is revealed as an elaborate hoax to honor
Satyr. & to make up with Encolpius he is even offered a woman to
have sex with - but at this point, the young man is struck by impotence.
His old friend Eumolpus shows up again & promises to help heal this
condition by a tour through the regional brothels, but nothing helps
Encolpius until he is told of Enotea (Donyale Luna), a powerful
sorceress specialized in such affairs. But while he egocentrically gets
healed by the woman, Ascyltus, who accompanied him, is killed by their
boatsman/slave, & as Encolpius gets back to Eumolpus, that man is
dead, too, & his testament forces his prospected heirs to eat his
corpse - which they gladly do in order to get the inheritance. Encolpius
on the other hand, with a young group of adventurers, takes off by ship
to other shores, to see more of the (then known) world ... This
is maybe the closest Federico Fellini ever came to making a genre-film
(in this case a peplum), & the subject at hand greatly compliments
his directorial style, by now shed of all neorealist bonds (which
greatly influenced his earlier works), instead the decadent to the point
of decay ancient Rome proves a great playground for Fellini's by now
fully developed over the top, no holds barred direction, & his
triumph of image over story would actually make narrative sense here -
as opposed to some later efforts like La Citta delle Donne, where
the episodic structure would never really come together to tell the
story. |