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‘Though they each had their own long history of acting in Fellini films, Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina had improbably never shared the screen together until Ginger and Fred, a film that functions at least partly as a tribute to their lovable personas. Despite their lack of previous collaboration, however, Mastroianni and Masina radiate a palpable chemistry as Pippo and Amelia, a pair of aging tap dancers who long ago retired their Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire masquerade act but who are now being recruited for a garish television variety show—a scenario that plainly reflects the actors’ own homecoming with Fellini. Arriving by train in a modernized Rome overrun with television screens, Amelia is escorted to a gaudy resort where, amidst numerous other caricatures of American pop culture figures, she’ll eventually reunite with Pippo and begin the exasperating process of reviving a dead routine with a man whose temperament and ideology have shifted far from what she remembers. Linking artifice with corruption in a way that essentially implicates his own filmmaking practice, Fellini casts a jaundiced eye on globalization and commercialism in this shaggy late-period melodrama, a film that finds a delicate frisson between bittersweet nostalgia and social critique.’ Harvard Film Archive

PG | The content is mild in impact