Just posted by the website Open Culture, here are a series of television commercials (!!) that the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini directed shortly before his death. Perhaps the most interesting one is for the Bank of Rome, in which Fernando Rey appears as a sympathetic psychiatrist. As the Open Culture website notes, “in 1991 Fellini made a series of three commercials for the Bank of Rome called Che Brutte Notti or The Bad Nights. ‘These commercials, aired the following year,’ writes Peter Bondanella in The Films of Federico Fellini, ‘are particularly interesting, since they find their inspiration in various dreams Fellini had sketched out in his dream notebooks during his career.’
In the commercial The Picnic Lunch Dream, the classic damsel-in-distress scenario is turned upside down when a man (played by Paolo Villaggio) finds himself trapped on the railroad tracks with a train bearing down on him while the beautiful woman he was dining with (Anna Falchi) climbs out of reach and taunts him. But it’s all a dream, which the man tells to his psychoanalyst (Fernando Rey). The analyst interprets the dream and assures the man that his nights will be restful if he puts his money in the Banco di Roma.”
Really worth watching; you can see Fellini’s masterful touch in every image.
