Summary
Waking from his dream, Guido returns to his hotel only to find the crew for his film gearing up for production. Everyone from the set designer to the lead actress asks Guido questions about the film, but he gives no answers and shows little enthusiasm.
The actress is particularly frustrated that she doesn't know which part she is playing. The casting director, Cesarino, brings Guido three old men from whom to cast the role of the protagonist's father, but Guido insists that they are all too young.
Breaking from his crew, he spots a beautiful woman dressed in white descending a staircase with a child. He snaps back into reality when he spots his producer descending the staircase too. He gives Guido a wristwatch and asks if he has any clearer ideas about the film.
That night, the crew gathers for a party in the spa's plaza. Gloria and Mario are there dancing, and Guido watches them, wearing a false nose that makes him look like Pinocchio. Carla is also there, but she sits at a separate table and tries to avoid making obvious eye contact with Guido.
Once again, he ignores the spitfire debates at his table, until someone asks him how many scenes are in the film. He replies that there are five scenes, and everyone laughs. A few complain that they are at the end of their rope with Guido.
Seeing Guido, Mario assures him that he is truly in love with Gloria and doesn't care that she may be using him for his money. He also reveals that he met her in London, as she goes to school with his daughter there.
A new performer takes the stage of the plaza to entertain the crowd—a magician partnered with a psychic. Together, they begin to read audience members' minds. They attempt to read Carla's mind, and she asks if she can think of a person rather than a phrase, stealing a meaningful glance at Guido. She backs out, giggling that it's too embarrassing.
Guido's party leaves the plaza, and the magician follows; apparently, he and Guido know each other. He reads Guido's mind, revealing the phrase, "asa nisi masa." The magician asks what it means.
We enter Guido's memory of a night at his childhood house, where the cousins and aunts are bathing the children in a wine bath. Guido is scared but eventually bathes. The women tuck the children into bed, but Guido and his cousin pretend to be asleep.
They wake up, and his cousin explains that the woman depicted in a painting that hangs on the wall comes to life if one merely recites, "asa nisi masa." She promises that the lady in the painting will reveal a treasure.
Analysis
In this section, the film's absurdist mood, to which we were introduced from the start, becomes even more prominent. This takes shape in the wealth of questions that Guido fields from his cast and crew. For example, his lead actress asks him what her role in the film will be, but he fails to tell her. Later, he tells the group his film will only have five scenes, which would be quite absurd. The endless questions about the film start to generate an atmosphere of absurdity, given that, at least in Guido's mind, there is no film.
We also see Guido's anxiety about his own mortality and aging surface here, as he is asked to select an actor to cast in the role based on his father but cannot choose one, believing them to be too young. "Next time, I'll bring you a corpse," his casting director remarks. Ostensibly, Guido says this because he believes the men are too close to his own age to believably play his father.
Fellini also plays with theme of truth and authenticity in this section through the image of Guido wearing a false nose. Seeing Guido watch Mario and Gloria dance while wearing a long, false nose alludes to Pinocchio, whose nose grows longer with every lie he tells. Guido questions yet admires Mario's relationship with Gloria, since it appears insincere but is actually quite the opposite, as Mario explains later. Guido's relationships often seem comparatively inauthentic.
Fellini continues to structure Guido's plotline using imagery that triggers the fluid transition between Guido's present and his memories, dreams, and fantasies. Here, that transition comes in the form of the phrase "asa nisi masa," which the psychic performing at the spa reads in Guido's mind. This provides the key to our journey into Guido's childhood memory, which the camera treats in much the same way as it does Guido's dreams, cutting directly from reality to the memory without signaling any change.
In this memory, Guido and numerous other children bathe in a vat of wine, which bares associations with baptism and rebirth. Young Guido is, of course, afraid to bathe in the wine at first but later gives in, echoing present-tense Guido's relationship to religion, sin, and forgiveness. Importantly, this memory of Guido's also breaks with Catholic tradition in that Guido's cousin encourages him to recite a spell that will bring a painting to life, revealing the cracks in Guido's Catholic upbringing even at a young age.
