When younger, I was a Fellini obsessive - I adored the excess, the humour, the grotesquerie, the sympathetic comedie humaine, the audacious visuals, the beautiful, sad, lonely Marcello Mastroianni. For some reason I hadn't seen one of his pictures for a while, and while his astounding images remained inviolable in my mind's private cinema, the gradual, repeated decline of his critical status made me tread fearfully into this nautical drama.

It is clearly his worst film. It always threatens to break into a frenzied dance of the Id, like his best pictures, but never quite does. The acting is generally poor, the dubbing atrocious; the ideas seem to cancel each other out in an aimless mess. Fellini's style is more restrained than usual, with a greater, seemingly restricted, emphasis on content composition and montage. It is clearly the work of a jaded Maestro.

And yet it contains more life, wit and magic than most films this year, and, needless to say, it is less silly than Titanic. The story (a group of mourners carrying the body of a celebrated opera singer on a huge liner as World War I breaks out) is open to many allegorical interpretations (ship as nation, empire, class, art, life etc.),none of which quite fit. There is much play on images of moon (Claire de lune tinkles throughout),tides and sunsets - possibly as motifs of decline, but also of the ever-continuing circle that is its opposite, life?

The film's tone is ambivalent, nostalgic for an elegant age of art and beauty, yet coldly aware of its inhuman faults. This is epitomised by the trademark Fellini altar ego, a journalist/film narrator, who watches the mixture of tragedy and farce with an amused eye, yet desperately wants to belong, and share in its faded grandeur.

There are wonderful set-pieces, and graceful, Kubrickian camera movements. The narrative and characterisation is constantly splintered, mocking the desire of the passengers for order and rank. Imperial folly is angrily lampooned, culminating in a remarkable burlesque dogfight, stylised as a Verdi opera, yielding, in impotent terror, the Force of Destiny.

The classical music soundtrack initially seems bland and uninventive, but actually offers, once identified, a stunning, ironic commentary on the actions, pretensions, sadnesses and failures of the characters and the society they represent. The party scene with the Serbs is very moving - loaded with the mixture of anger and regret that constitute the film's heart.

The self-reflexivity does not patronise the audience for giving into illusion - the film's 'reality' is in question from the beginning. Film is shown not to be a modern weapon of the future (cinema as an art-form emerged at around the same time as the film was set),but merely a skip for the bricolage of Europe and the past. This pessimism, though, is not despairing - there is great beauty in loss.

This is one weird film--and Fellini intended it to be. The plot doesn't seem all that important, but the "voyage" there is the substance of the film. A luxury liner is chartered by a group of rich admirers of a recently deceased opera diva. Their purpose is to bury her ashes at sea, but the actual burial only takes a very tiny portion of the film. Instead, the focus is on the journey itself and it is done in a combination of SLOW and artistic shot combined with a very surreal sensibility. Sometimes, the people move in a rhythmic fashion, while at others they break into VERY elaborate operatic numbers and the sets are NOT the least bit realistic at times but look more like art nouveau pieces of art. I particularly was captivated by the scene in which the rich travelers visit the boiler room and try to outdo each other in singing. It's just so strange yet compelling. I liked the film very much, but would certainly NOT want a steady diet of this type of movie. About the only thing I really hated was at the very end when the cameras panned back and showed the actual film crew and set. This completely took me out of the weird moment and seemed unnecessary--I wanted to remain stuck in this strange world a little longer and hated to be reminded it was all a movie. This was, by the way, the same reaction I had at the ending to THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO.

By all means it is not of Fellini's finest, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Amarcord and La Strada involved and moved me more. However along with Ginger and Fred(my personal favourite of that particular part of Fellini's career),When the Ship Sails On it is one of Fellini's better later films after Amarcord. The visuals as to expect from Fellini are simply gorgeous in both photography and scenery. The music is both beautiful and quirky. While Fellini's direction is more restrained than usual, there is still the distinctive style that made his films so wonderful. The story has some nostalgia, some surrealistic beauty and some impish humour, all three of which blend superbly and are interesting individually. The sudden arrival of Balkan refugees does have an emotional impact. If there was a weak point it was the acting, Freddie Jones as always is excellent but the rest are uneven ranging from decent to poor. The dubbing also has moments of sloppiness. Overall, a fine film and while not one of my favourites of the later Fellinis it does stand out as one of the better ones. 9/10 Bethany Cox