Summary
Back in their hotel room, Guido hears Luisa emerging from the bathroom and fakes being asleep. She calls the front desk and asks about Enrico but is told he's still out. She takes a pill, and Guido asks her about it; it's a tranquilizer she takes before bed. She gets into bed with Guido and starts laughing at him, explaining that she could never cheat on someone as absurd as him.
Guido replies that he resents that she's reducing his life to the "pettiness of someone stealing from a cookie jar." They continue fighting before falling asleep.
The next morning, Guido sits with Luisa and Rossella in the plaza. They watch as Carla disembarks from an ornate horse-drawn carriage nearby. Luisa reveals that she's known about his affair since she arrived in town, and she and Rossella chastise Guido for mixing Carla up in their life together.
Suddenly, Carla begins singing as we drift into one of Guido's fantasies. Luisa compliments Carla on her voice; Carla admits she dresses trashily.
Next, we jump to a countryside dwelling in which several women from Guido's past dote on him, forming his personal harem. Not only are Carla, Luisa, Rossella, Gloria, Seraghina, the French actress, and the mystery women in white there, but also a Danish stewardess, a Hawaiian girl, and a French showgirl, all from Guido's travels.
The showgirl, Jacqueline, begins to protest being relegated to the complex's upper floor, where Guido has ordered she be retired, since she is too old to please him. Dissension brews amongst the women, who begin rebelling against Guido. Suddenly, however, Guido begins whipping the women, and they fall in line. Jacqueline gives an awkward farewell dance, and the women try to cheer up Guido.
In voiceover, Guido confesses he prepared a speech for the women and imagined Carla playing the harp. Luisa does chores and admits that she understands that coexisting with Guido's harem is how their life is supposed to be.
We jump to a showing of the screen tests for Guido's movie. Luisa is there, and Guido talks to her under his breath. Daumier continues to criticize the film (and Guido's ego), and Guido imagines Daumier being hung. The producer enters and gives a speech about needing to cast the film at the risk of becoming a laughingstock.
Luisa watches each screen test intently, and the women around her curse Guido for writing a script that so closely mirrors his relationship with her. The actress onscreen, auditioning for the role of the protagonist's wife, wears glasses exactly like Luisa's. The producer shouts out that this actress is perfect for the role, and Luisa storms out.
Guido follows Luisa to the theater's lobby, where she accuses him of using their lives to stroke his ego. She tells him she's leaving him and walks out.
Analysis
In this section, we see the same kind of fluid transition between reality and fantasy that we've seen throughout the film. This occurs when Guido listens to Luisa and Rossella berate him for having an affair with someone as silly as Carla while Carla herself sits nearby. Suddenly, Carla breaks out into song, and Luisa compliments her on her beautiful voice; soon, they are behaving like friends and confidantes. This subtle transition between Guido's reality and fantasy—suggested to us only via a sly look on Guido's face that shows his mind drifting elsewhere when Luisa and Rossella yell at him—contributes to the surreal quality of the film, since we are unsure of whether we are watching real events or ones fabricated by Guido's imagination.
Of course, that we are watching Guido's greatest fantasy unfold soon becomes clear, as we see him doted on by numerous women while Luisa watches happily. This fantasy is not without its nightmares, however. When Guido banishes Jacqueline Bonbon to the dwelling's upper floor, for example, a full-scale rebellion begins. This particular episode speaks to the theme of mortality and aging, since Guido seems aware of his distaste for women who are older than he is, which many of the girls—even in his own fantasy—protest as hypocritical. Indeed, Jacqueline's sad, washed-up final dance functions as the ultimate symbol of the grotesque quality in denying one's old age.
Interestingly, most of the women we see in Guido's fantasy are not authentic versions of themselves, but archetypes (a sexy Danish stewardess, a spitfire Hawaiian girl). This is especially true of Luisa, who wears a provincial costume akin to that of a maid and cleans up after Guido's large harem. At the end of his fantasy, Luisa admits that she understands Guido's desire for other women and knows this is how they'll be happy. In this section, all other noise cuts out and the fantasy takes a turn for the somber, since this subservient attitude seems to accent the real-life emotional stress that Guido inflicts on his wife.
Fellini's film-within-a-film motif reaches what is perhaps a culmination in this section, since Guido, his crew, and Luisa all gather to watch screen tests so they can cast his film. Here, Fellini's camera alternates between an objective distance from the screen on which the tests are projected and framing out everything but the screen (in a way, becoming the screen itself). This perfectly mirrors the relationship between Guido's own life and his film, since this device puts us, as viewers, inside the screen tests much like Fellini puts us inside Guido's subjectivity and imagination throughout the film.
In these screen tests, the characters for whom actresses audition mirror real people from Guido's life almost to the point of synthesis. The actress auditioning for the role of the protagonist's wife, for example, delivers lines that are clearly drawn from Guido's real conversations with Luisa, and eventually, she is asked to put on a pair of glasses identical to those worn by Luisa. This, too, contributes to a surreality that ultimately proves too much for Luisa, as she storms out and leaves Guido in the middle of the screenings.
