A delicate balance of ambiguity and nonsense. I imagine this film's themes and plot like you’re on the inside of a hollow sphere. You don’t see the outside, the full picture. You don’t see the surface, its texture, details, color. All you see is the darkened hollow area, and it rolls around as the film takes you throughout its many avenues. It throws a combination of scenes that are ambiguous and vague, and some vivid scenes that don’t ever seem to matter, they’re nonsensical thematically. And in a twist of meta-contextualization you live in a film that’s being made before your eyes. This film is famously about a filmmaker making a movie. And the movie he is making you find out very heavy-handedly (albeit not in words), that in the middle portion of the film that it is in every thematic sense the same movie you’re watching.
The reason for that being the case is entirely revolving around the main character, Guido. The acclaimed director who is making a movie that no one knows about. He keeps all the information to himself because he has written a story entirely personal to himself. He wrote his life, attempting to re-contextualize his flaws into right thinking. His world throughout the movie is almost trapped in his head. Everything is seen through his eyes, well almost everything. The only character that really seems to operate and think outside of his limits is his wife. The one thing he can’t control in his world. And it's that relationship that defines the conflict of the film. Guido has everything under his control. That doesn’t mean however, that he likes everything, in fact he seems to be happy with very little. He has control of the story, because we see it through his eyes. And many many things go against him, push against him, but yet it's still him that everything in the film flows through, good and bad. Except his wife.
His wife thinks and operates independently of him. And he doesn’t know how to handle that. She thinks his mistakes are mistakes, his flaws, flaws. Even though most other people throughout the story couldn’t care about his affairs, his skewed look at the world. But his wife does. And the film being made, I believe is an effort made by Guido to understand why that is. He tries to understand why his wife is as independent and important and as human as he is.
And that’s really what intrigues me the most about this film’s loose structure. Because it's not about a story. Even though it is a story Gudio tries to tell to understand what the film is about. He tries and tries, and a critic who read the story thinks it's badly written, ambiguous for no reason, poorly schemed and devised. And in every way the critic character is right. Because it doesn’t make sense, and won’t. The writer, the storyteller, Guido can’t write a story clear enough to understand the thing he is trying to say. Because no single story can describe someone's life. In his self-imposed, self-centered story about himself trying to figure out how his relationships work he never leaves his own mind. Until the finale.
He finally escapes from his own perception, his own side of the relationship. And he sees a fuller picture, the picture that he was trying to make. He has an anti-crisis, a realization of other selves. He had what could be considered an incredible sense of self. But it was so good he couldn’t even see himself from the outside. And he certainly couldn’t see others. But at the end of the film, (Spoilers) all the characters from the film join together once Guido comes to the realization I mentioned and he sees the importance of every other person around him. He became too consumed by his own ideas, that the importance of others simply faded. But it all becomes clear in the end. And as a viewer you see the outside of the sphere. The texture, surface, color, and everything else. You see the film, at the end of the film.