Satyricon

After his young lover Gitone leaves him for another man, Encolpio tries to kill himself, but a sudden earthquake destroys his house before he can act. Homeless and shaken, he wanders a surreal Rome ruled by Nero, where everyday scenes shift into grotesque pageants and bizarre encounters. He drifts from one episode to the next, meeting lechers, actors, poets, and grotesque hosts who alternately seduce, mock, and attack him. The film unfolds as a series of episodes rather than a linear story, emphasizing mood, excess, and the collapse of social norms. Encolpio's desires and humiliations propel the narrative, while the world around him behaves like a fever dream. The tone is bawdy and strange, often shifting between comedy and menace.

Released in 1969, Satyricon was directed by Federico Fellini and co-written with Bernardino Zapponi, taking loose inspiration from Petronius' Satyricon. The cast includes Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, and Max Born, and the film features lavish sets and provocative, surreal imagery.

Reliable box office figures for Satyricon are not widely reported, and no standard worldwide gross is commonly cited. The film found most of its audience through art-house venues, festival screenings, and international distribution rather than mainstream blockbuster runs overseas overall.

Fellini's Satyricon left a lingering visual imprint, its hallucinatory sets and extravagant tableaux often cited by filmmakers, photographers, and stage designers. Its anarchic approach to ancient Rome helped shift period filmmaking toward stylized, symbolic recreations, and several sequences are still referenced in academic and popular discussions of cinematic excess today.

Critical reaction was mixed to positive, with many viewers praising Fellini's visual invention while others criticized the film's fragmentary structure; on user sites it averages about 6.7 out of 10. Major themes include decadence, desire, power, social decay, satire, and the porous line between memory and fantasy, and moral ambiguity.