And the Ship Sails On

Director: Federico Fellini

1983 / 128min / DCP

Fellini’s art of artifice finds its ultimate expression in And the Ship Sails On, an exquisitely detailed soundstage confabulation set on the eve of WWI, which brings together a motley ensemble crew of revolutionaries, aristocrats, show folk, and defiant Serbs on a luxury liner that’s out on a carnivalesque memorial cruise, sailing cellophane waters towards a mythic island in the Adriatic where the ashes of a dead grand opera diva are to be scattered. A delicious debauch on the high seas, finely filigreed throughout with the director’s oddball comic vignettes and featuring fantastic flights of fancy in costume and production design (the latter by virtuoso Dante Ferretti), Fellini’s ode to a long lost prewar Europe is less a eulogy than a final, festive spree.