Summary
Guido returns to his hotel and learns that his wife has called the front desk three times. Although he tries to sneak past the various people in the lobby, Guido is cornered by his lead actress, who demands he tell her what part she's playing. As the actress pesters Guido with stories of her dramatic versatility, we watch Gloria listening to Mario's piano playing nearby, which strikes Guido as effortlessly enchanting in comparison.
Guido continues upstairs, where his production crew is preparing the elaborate costumes and set sketches for his film in a large suite. Guido finds the teenage nieces of his colleague lounging in the suite's bedroom, where they accuse Guido of failing to understand how to make a love story. Guido replies that she's right.
Conocchia, Guido's set designer, pulls him aside in the hotel's hallway and accuses Guido of enforcing harsh working conditions without giving his crew praise or even much information about the film. He cries and tells Guido he's not the man he used to be.
Guido is clearly affected by Conocchia's accusations and returns to his hotel room in a dreamy state. He has a vision of the same woman in white about whom he fantasized earlier at the spa. He asks her what it means to be truly honest, assuming she is a symbol of "purity and spontaneity." She dons a white headdress.
In a eureka moment, Guido imagines a character like this in his film. The woman gets into bed with him and tells him she's come to "bring order."
Late at night, Guido's phone rings, and he learns that Carla is sick with a fever from gorging on the spa's mineral water. He visits her the next afternoon and finds she has a fever of 104 degrees, a chronic illness for her.
Despite Guido's appeals, Carla refuses to notify her husband of her illness. Instead, she blames Guido for leaving her alone too much and begins talking about her will. All Guido can think about, however, is what he'll say at his appointment to see the local cardinal tomorrow.
At this appointment, Guido attempts to do research on Catholicism, since his protagonist is a lapsed Catholic seeking a revelation. The cardinal changes the subject from Catholicism to questions about Guido's personal life. He also explains that the bird they hear calling is called a "diomedeo," because its call sounds like crying (calling to mind mythic Diomedes' funeral).
While the cardinal talks, Guido spots a plump woman on a hill nearby that triggers a memory from his childhood in which he and his friends snuck away from school to watch a plump woman who lived near the sea, Seraghina, dance the rumba for them. The local clergy eventually discover the boys watching her, but only Guido is caught and punished.
After a series of punishments, young Guido enters his church's confession booth, where he is told that Seraghina is the devil. Nonetheless, he sneaks back to Seraghina's seaside dwelling, and she smiles upon seeing him.
Analysis
This section opens with a scene that is symbolic of Guido's search for authenticity in his life. As we hear his lead actress bore Guido with stories of her past roles, we also see Guido watching Gloria, whose effortless authenticity seems to embody the very joie de vivre to which Guido's actress aspires. "I played a woman marked by the injustices of time yet still desirable," the actress assures Guido, "I am this character. I'm like her in life and love. I'm very sensual, and wicked too." Simultaneously, Gloria playfully engages Mario, therein embodying the contradictions and attraction that the actress can only hope to imitate.
We likewise see Fellini's symbols of purity, particularly water, complicated here. Whereas water has heretofore functioned as a symbol of purity and rejuvenation, it poisons Carla, who drinks an excess of mineral water because Guido leaves her alone too much. Just as Guido's notion of authenticity and rebirth will grow complicated as he endeavors (and fails) to create an honest film, so too do symbols of that authenticity, such as water and the color white.
The latter, for example, grows complicated in the sequence containing Guido's memory of Seraghina. Although the clergy try to convince young Guido that Seraghina is the devil—supported in a way by her mischievous dancing and dark, grotesque appearance—when he returns to Seraghina's seaside dwelling, she wears a white scarf in her hair, linking her to images of purity and innocence used throughout the film. One of these is, of course, the fantasized image of Guido's ideal woman, who always wears white and even explicitly tells Guido she wants to "bring order." Seraghina, in contrast, complicates the rather simplistic, even Manichaean notion of white as "pure" to which Guido subscribes throughout the film.
We also see the notion of Guido's film as an absurdist enterprise developed further in this section, particularly when Guido enters the maze-like suite in which his production team prepares for the film. Much like the film set we see later, this room is fragmented and overwrought, filled with employees sketching and building elaborate sets and costumes for a film that will not be made. This feeds into a growing sense of absurdity, since Guido's ideas for the film's actual story are underdeveloped and, according to Daumier, gratuitous compared to the vast infrastructure being built around it.
This absurdity is inherently linked to a likewise-increasing sense of irony surrounding the film-within-a-film nature of Fellini's storyline. For example, when Guido visits the local cardinal, one of his assistants tells Guido that it's unrealistic to write a scene in which his protagonist visits a cardinal at a spa. This is ironic, since this is exactly what Guido himself does in this scene, and again later in the film.
Fellini likewise develops the theme of mortality and death in this section, particularly via the imagery of the diomedeo bird, whose call sounds like sobbing. The cardinal explains that the bird is named after Diomedes, a hero in Homer's Iliad who dies tragically.
