Movie Description

Fellini Satyricon, or simply Satyricon, is a 1969 Italian fantasy drama film written and directed by Federico Fellini and loosely based on Petronius's work, Satyricon, written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome. The film is divided into nine episodes, following the scholar Encolpius and his friend Ascyltus as they try to win the heart of the young boy Giton, whom they both love, within the film's depiction of a surreal and dreamlike Roman landscape and culture.

For Vincent Canby of the New York Times, Satyricon was "the quintessential Fellini film, a travelogue through an unknown galaxy, a magnificently realized movie of his and our wildest dreams". Roger Ebert, who called the film a "masterpiece," wrote, "It is so much more ambitious and audacious than most of what we see today that simply as a reckless gesture, it shames these timid times." For Archer Winston of the New York Post, the film's classical background in Petronius was fused into "a powerful contemporary parallel. It is so beautifully composed and imagined that you would do yourself a disservice if, for any reason, you allowed yourself to miss it". Author Parker Tyler declared it "the most profoundly homosexual movie in all history".