Ginger and Fred

Director: Federico Fellini

1986 / 127min / 35mm

The romantic escapism of old Hollywood and the ubiquitous crudity of commercial television collide in Fellini’s late masterwork, co-written with favorite collaborators Guerra and Tullio Pinelli, about an aging pair of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire impersonators (Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni, opposite one another for the first time) reunited after 30 years to perform on a ludicrous live TV variety show extravaganza. A film that finds Il Maestro simultaneously at his most sentimental and his most scourging, savage in his depiction of MTV-era aesthetic assault and garbage-strewn contemporary Rome, deeply tender in his dealings with his two stars.