The Life of Dreams: The White Sheik (1952)

Little more than ten minutes into Federico Fellini’s 1952 movie Lo sceicco bianco, or The White Sheik, a character makes a remark that seems to encapsulate and anticipate the filmmaker’s entire body of work yet to come: “Real life is the life of dreams.” Although Fellini was far from a novice in the world of cinema by this point — his earliest uncredited contributions as a screenwriter date back well over a decade to 1939, when he was just nineteen years old, and he had co-directed Variety Lights (Luci del varietà) with Alberto Lattuada in 1950 — The White Sheik represents his first solo effort in the director’s chair, and in retrospect those words come across as a sort of manifesto or statement of purpose. Later, of course, there would be the vividly depicted dreams and fantasies of films like 8½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (Giulietta degli spiriti, 1965), in which the boundaries between the concrete and the imagined become hazy or cease to exist completely, and a significant portion of his output from the 1960s onward might be described as larger than life, surreal, artificial or some combination of those terms. However, even in his work from the 1950s, which tends to be more firmly rooted in the real world, dreams of one kind or another are present and potent: consider the title character in Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria, 1957) with her dreams of a better life, or Moraldo and his friends in I vitelloni (1953) dreaming of something different from their current aimless existence. Compared to these examples, the dreams that drive The White Sheik exude a decidedly more fantastic flavor. In that respect, the film might be seen as a foretaste of the Fellini of the future as well as a typical product of his early period — one that remains tethered to everyday, sometimes cold reality.

From the instant she first appears onscreen, handing luggage down from the window of a train in her flowered hat, veil, gloves and coat, Wanda Cavalli (Brunella Bovo) suggests nothing so much as a little girl dressed as a grown-up. Never mind the fact that she’s twenty years old; never mind the fact that she’s a married woman; there’s something unquestionably childlike in her face and her manner, in her wide eyes and her timidity. Besides, the change to her marital status is still so fresh that it’s hardly surprising that it hasn’t quite taken hold yet. On the heels of their wedding, the former Wanda Giardino and her new husband, Ivan (Leopoldo Trieste), have traveled from their provincial hometown of Altovilla Marittima to Rome for a short visit — ostensibly a honeymoon trip, but Ivan’s meticulously scheduled plans don’t leave much room for romance. “I’ve got each minute of the day planned,” he tells his wife as he reels off their itinerary, proudly asserting that “from 1:00 PM to midnight we won’t have a single free moment.” Of primary importance is a late-morning audience with the pope, arranged by an uncle (Ugo Attanasio) who has an important position at the Vatican. (It’s not quite as grand an honor as he initially makes it sound: when an intimidated Wanda asks if she’ll be expected to speak, he replies that he doesn’t think so. “No, there’ll be two hundred couples.”) The rest of the day will be taken up with sightseeing at a succession of ancient and patriotic points of interest, after which he promises “an intimate supper, followed by a restful night.” Except in these last two items (one assumes), the newlyweds will constantly be in the company of Ivan’s Roman relatives, including that aforementioned influential uncle. “If he snaps his fingers in Rome, all of Altovilla Marittima jumps,” Ivan tells Wanda. “I intend to be on the town council before two months are up.” For all of his obvious excitement at being in Rome — he even speaks of their upcoming visit to Altar of the Nation with something like religious reverence on his face and in his voice — it’s obvious that there’s a self-serving aspect to this trip, which provides an ideal opportunity to curry favor with his uncle.

Despite her innocent appearance, Wanda soon exhibits cunning of her own. Upon receiving Ivan’s permission to go down the hall and take a bath before they go to meet his family (“Yes, there is time, my dear,” he declares after an agonizing pause), she seizes her chance to sneak out of the hotel. In light of Ivan’s often bossy and officious demeanor and Wanda’s childlike air, the scene evokes a teenager evading her father’s watchful eye in order to go out and have some fun more than a wife betraying her husband. Childlike, too, is Wanda’s failure to turn off the water in the bathtub when she leaves, but she has far more important things on her mind just then. Having already asked for directions from a hotel porter (Enzo Maggio) while Ivan was out of the room, she hurriedly makes her way on foot to the nearby Via XXIV Maggio and enters the office of her favorite fotoromanzo (a magazine telling serialized stories illustrated with photographs). It’s only meant to be the briefest of visits, brief enough to enable her to return to the bathroom before the napping Ivan ever realizes that she’s tricked him. Her intention in going there — her supreme dream — is to meet her idol Fernando Rivoli (Alberto Sordi), star of the ongoing story “The White Sheik,” to whom she’s been writing fan letters under the pseudonym “Passionate Dolly.” She’s even received a response inviting her to see him if she ever comes to Rome, but her hopes are immediately dashed when she learns that he’s not at the office. “He only comes in for his salary,” one man says, while another informs her that she’ll have to wait until Saturday. “But I’m leaving tomorrow,” she replies. With time running out, it looks as if she’ll have to settle for dropping off a large portrait of him that she’s drawn as a gift — until, almost before she can comprehend what’s happening, she finds herself climbing into the back of a truck with various cast and crew members en route to a photo shoot on the beach, far from the city and the hotel where the overflowing bathtub has alerted a panic-stricken Ivan to her absence.

“I wait all week for my issue of your magazine to arrive. I pick it up at the station, run home and lock myself in my room,” Wanda tells Marilena Alba Vellardi (Fanny Marchiò), the writer responsible for those cherished stories. (Meeting her at the office before the departure for the photo shoot is an enormous thrill in and of itself. When she offers Wanda a cigarette, the young woman says that she doesn’t smoke but that she’ll take it as a souvenir — another manifestation of her childlike nature.) “That’s when my real life begins. I read all night long.” It’s at this point that the author remarks on real life being the life of dreams, and Wanda agrees emphatically. “I’m always dreaming. There’s nothing else to do there. The people are so vulgar. Young men don’t know how to speak to a girl, you know?” Whether or not she’s including her husband in this censure is left unstated, yet judging by his tendency to order her around, already much on display, it’s far from improbable. Frankly, it’s difficult to picture the two of them as a couple of equals capable of true intimacy, especially of the emotional variety, although the delightfully puerile poem that Ivan has written about his wife (“She is graceful, sweet and teeny…”) and the many photos of her that he carries in his wallet indicate a softer, more affectionate side to him. At any rate, her expression of boredom and dissatisfaction with Altovilla Marittima underlines the idea that Rome, with all of its possibilities both real and imagined, appears to her as a kind of fantasy world or magical place in its own right. Even before this, her look of amazement whenever she gazes at her surroundings has made that abundantly clear. Notably, though, it’s Ivan and not Wanda who’s shown leaning out of the window in awe as the couple’s train enters the Eternal City in the opening shots of the film. Rome is a magical place to him as well, a site where dreams can come true, except that his dreams — of gaining a foothold in local politics, for instance, and whatever else his uncle’s patronage might do for him — are of a much more practical and prosaic nature than his wife’s fotoromanzo-inspired exotic yearnings.

The film has fun blurring the lines between the mundane and the romantic without ever slipping into the realm of full-fledged fantasy. Wanda’s first glimpse of Fernando Rivoli in the flesh is a good example: dismayed at realizing that the truck has taken her twenty-six kilometers outside of Rome and desperate to locate a telephone, Wanda is stumbling through a wooded area near the beach where the photo shoot is to take place when she hears a man singing somewhere above her head. Looking up, she sees… him. “The White Sheik!” she gasps. Decked out in full costume and soaring through the air on a swing too high to be reached by any visible means, he possesses an aura of unreality, as if he’s magically materialized from the pages of the magazine or out of Wanda’s imagination. Once he dismounts and Wanda is face to face with him, she’s ecstatic, in a state of rapture, as is only natural — but to someone regarding Fernando with more objective eyes, he has a palpable, unmistakable ridiculousness about him, especially at close range. Part of it is his heavy makeup and the fact that he’s a white Italian man dressed as an African sheik (or at least another Italian’s conception of an African sheik), and part lies in the casting of a comedic actor like Sordi instead of somebody more conventionally dashing and heroic. He conveys just the right amount of absurdity for the viewer’s benefit while his character remains in character, keeping up the façade that his admirer expects. She’s oblivious to the absurdity; to her, he’s everything she dreams of and desires. When the two of them dance together a few minutes later, this breathtaking, otherworldly moment for Wanda occurs at an ordinary outdoor refreshment stand under the eyes of numerous onlookers. The scene carries a touch of magic for many of those people too, though Fernando’s whistling and his attempts at flashy moves provide enough silliness to balance that out and keep things grounded.

Juxtapositions of this ilk abound throughout the photo shoot. A camel cuts an incongruous figure among the cameras, ladders, platforms and beach umbrellas necessary to make “The White Sheik” come to life, while performers in elaborate costumes mingle with crew members in everyday clothes as well as a fascinated man in swimwear (Mimo Billi) who ends up standing right in the middle of the action, invoking the ire of cast and crew alike. There’s not much glamour in it — mostly arguments, complaints, stress, impatience, shouting and chaos. The director (Ernesto Almirante), for one, is in a near-constant rage, particularly when dealing with actors who have colds and hope to be permitted to wear shoes instead of going barefoot, or who want to go swimming, or who disappear for hours. It’s little or nothing more than a job to these people. Even Marilena Alba Vellardi, who speaks with animation and enthusiasm during her conversation with Wanda at the office, sometimes gives the impression that she may merely be humoring her young reader.

Fernando also plays into Wanda’s infatuation with the fantasy world of the fotoromanzo and with his character in particular. He’s obviously well-accustomed to attention from women for his title role in “The White Sheik” — at the refreshment stand, one approaches him for his autograph and another asks how the story will end (“Why do you want to know? It would ruin the romance of it.”) — but Wanda may strike him as easier prey than most. In a sense, he creates a fantasy world of his own through the lies he crafts to seduce her. After he hoists her into a sailboat and sets out to sea, seemingly on an impulse (and to the immense irritation of both his director and the boat’s owner), Fernando finds himself unexpectedly faced with rejection when he tries to elicit a kiss from Wanda, who employs the flowery phrasing of her beloved stories to tell him that she “can’t surrender” to him. “Some things are larger and more powerful than we ourselves.” (Earlier, she had introduced herself to him under her maiden name, perhaps not with any intent to hide her marriage but because she still thinks of herself as Wanda Giardino rather than Wanda Cavalli.) The revelation that she’s “not unattached” doesn’t bother him: he’s married too. Seeing that this troubles the young woman, he’s quick to assure her that his union is a sham. With pseudo-reluctance, he then launches into a ludicrous tale about how he once loved another woman (beautiful, but much less so than Wanda), and how his now-wife (Gina Mascetti) used a magic potion to sabotage their wedding, doing away with his bride and putting him in a deep sleep that erased his memory, so that he was tricked into marrying her instead. Wanda’s apparent acceptance of this unmitigated poppycock makes her seem not so much innocent and naïve as dimwitted, but let’s be generous: maybe she’s simply caught up in the unreality of the moment. By this stage, she’s even been dressed in a harem costume to serve as an extra, so if she’s starting to lose her bearings a bit, it’s understandable. When Fernando makes another move to kiss her, she looks to be on the verge of giving in — a moot point, because just at that instant the sail intervenes by swinging around and hitting him in the head, not once but twice.

Comedy and lightness prevail, even after Fernando’s wife, Rita, shows up at the beach, instantly transforming her husband into a groveling coward and Wanda’s dream into a nightmare. Back in Rome, meanwhile, Ivan has been suffering through his own nightmare ever since he discovered his wife’s disappearance and, more alarming still, a letter addressed to “Passionate Dolly” and signed “Your White Sheik.” Admittedly, there is something gratifying in seeing the self-important Ivan run around in a bug-eyed frenzy, desperate to locate Wanda while simultaneously preventing his relatives from suspecting that anything is amiss; besides, he seems to be as concerned about the potential stain on his family’s good name as he is about her welfare. Wanda is more sympathetic in her growing despair. “Yes, life is a dream, but sometimes that dream is a bottomless pit,” she says, yet the film treats her rather gently, considering how dark the situation threatens to turn at times. When the man who gives her a ride back to the city tries to convince her to come to his house “for a plate of risotto,” he gives up fairly easily in the face of her refusal, settling for calling her a tease and telling her to jump in a lake before he drives away. Even her lowest and most perilous moment is hastily undercut with humor before it can get too heavy. It all works out in the end — well enough, anyway. “You’re my White Sheik,” a tearful Wanda tells Ivan in the final scene, receiving only a look of confusion in return. Has her experience helped her to accept the “vulgarity” of the real world, or has she just traded one illusion for another of a slightly more practical variety? The life of dreams lives on… and on throughout the Fellini films to follow.

Source

Chandler, Charlotte. I, Fellini. New York: Cooper Square, 2001.

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