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Petronius' Satyricon, the inspiration for Fellini's masterful, albeit non-linear, eponymous film, has a good claim on being the first novel ever written. Unfortunately, Petronius' work was not transmitted to our day in anything even vaguely resembling a complete text. The chapters, or rather what are left of them, break off at inconvenient moments, sections are severely disjointed, transitions are non-existent, and so on. Fellini's adaptation is actually quite good.<br /><br />Sextus Petronius, by all accounts the Emperor's minister of good taste, or arbiter elegantium, not only wrote a number of short poems and epigrams, but also committed suicide after being implicated in a plot against Nero. Petronius took his own life in much the same way that John Gielgud's Nerva did in Tinto Brass' 1979 film Caligula.<br /><br />The linearity expected from contemporary film is absent in Satyricon, and rightly so. Instead of lamenting Fellini's seemingly poor control of the narrative, audiences should be applauding his triumph in bringing the full experience of this chaotic yet important film to the screen.<br /><br />Fellini never made an 'easy' film; but to approach Satyricon without a modicum of serious preparation is setting oneself up for a severe disappointment. Read Petronius' surviving fragments before watching the film, and do not focus on the well known passages everyone has studied in Latin 101, instead consider the disjointed rhythms of the randomly fragmented narrative. |