Summary
A man approaches Guido and informs him that a woman named Claudia is waiting for him in the back of the theater. Guido is delighted and asks Claudia—the real-life woman in white from his fantasies—to leave with him. They get in his car and drive off.
Once in the car, he confesses his love for her, and she reciprocates. He asks her if she could ever start her life over again and be faithful to one thing, admitting he couldn't do so himself. Guido confesses that he is terrified of making the wrong decision every day, so he changes direction constantly and is therefore emotionally "bleeding to death." He hears the sound of the natural springs and tells her to turn down the road leading to them.
Guido describes the role he wants Claudia to play in his film, describing a totally contradictory woman (at once a child and a woman, ancient yet young) who will wear white. They park near the entrance to the springs. Lapsing from reality, he imagines Claudia in white with a candle, setting the table in the middle of the street.
Claudia tells Guido she doesn't find a protagonist who doesn't love anything sympathetic. He reacts defensively, and she laughs at him, calling him an old man. She insists that his real problem is that he doesn't know how to love. Finally, Claudia calls him a phony, realizing that there's no part for her in the film. Guido confirms this and admits there's not even a film to be made.
Suddenly, several cars drive up, and Guido's producer announces that he's calling a press conference for Guido at the site of the spaceship set tomorrow.
The next day, the set is swarming with reporters and critics. Guido tries to run away and dodge their absurd questions, but his colleagues force him to sit down and address the crowd. The magician who read Guido's mind earlier is there and wishes him good luck.
The reporters grow more hostile by the minute, cackling that "he has nothing to say!" Guido's producer threatens to "ruin" Guido if he doesn't perform well.
Guido apologizes to Conocchia, admitting that he was Guido's favorite. In the reflective surface of the table at which he sits, Guido sees Luisa (in a vision) dressed in a wedding gown. She asks if she should leave him. Next, she appears behind some reporters who are asking Guido what his wife thinks of his films.
Guido climbs under the table to collect his thoughts, and everyone calls him a coward. He finds a gun in his pocket and remembers his mother chasing him on the beach when he was a boy. He fires the gun, killing himself.
Suddenly, the noise of the crowd cuts out, and the set is vacant. A voice orders some construction workers to dismantle the set, as the film is cancelled. Guido, however, is alive. Daumier tells him he made the right decision in abandoning the film, since the world doesn't need any more superfluous art.
Guido sees the magician approach the car where he sits with Daumier; the man tells him, "we're ready to begin." As Daumier rattles on about the purpose of art, Guido sees several visions of the people in his life dressed in white, marching together on the nearby beach.
In voiceover, Guido has a realization that his confusion about the film and his personal life are themselves the honest story he wants to tell, and that he's no longer afraid of telling the truth about what he doesn't yet understand in life. He addresses Luisa, asking her to accept him as he is. Suddenly appearing, she agrees to try.
Accompanied by a motley band playing circus music, the people from Guido's past and present begin to dance together in what appears to be a circus ring. All at once, these people disappear, leaving only the band, whose members file out one by one as the industrial lights of Guido's incomplete set switch off.
Analysis
This last portion of the film begins by deflating one of Guido's dominant fantasies: the ideal woman. Once Luisa leaves the screening, real-life Claudia appears, and she is much like Guido's fantasy of her throughout the film—as if by pure magic, she rescues Guido from his messy life. In fact, he is all too eager to whisk her away and tells her almost immediately that he loves her, but gradually their perfect relationship begins to wrinkle.
Claudia soon begins laughing at Guido, telling him he looks like an old man and that he doesn't know how to love. Importantly, Claudia wears black during this encounter, whereas she has consistently worn white in his fantasies of her, in itself a symbolic deflation of his idea of her as the perfect woman. In fact, even during their adventure, Guido fantasizes about a more ideal version of Claudia who dresses in white and lights a candle at a romantic dinner table in the middle of the street. This becomes an important moment in which Guido begins to realize there is no such thing as the perfect woman.
Ironically, Guido's harshly real encounter with Claudia is interrupted by a scene that echoes the opening dream sequence of the film. Interrupting his conversation with Claudia, Guido's producer and crew drive up and announce that they're throwing a press conference so that Guido can promote his new film. The following shot depicts several cars driving close together, descending on the spaceship set for Guido's film. This visually rhymes with the film's opening sequence, in which Guido dreams he is stuck in a traffic jam, suffocated by smoke issuing from his car's engine. Not only does this visual echo foreshadow the symbolic suffocation we see Guido endure during the following press conference, but it also plays with the boundary between dream and reality already present in his discussion with real-life Claudia, who greatly differs from his fantasies of her.
This press conference also functions as the culmination of our confusion about the boundary between Guido's dreams, memories, and fantasies and his real life. Here, Luisa appears as a reflection in the shiny table at which he is expected to speak about his film, and later she appears as part of the crowd, always wearing a white wedding gown. This is the first instance in which Guido's imagination projects itself into the space and people of his real life; Luisa appears almost as a ghost would, mingling unseen with reporters. This escalates until Guido fantasizes that he commits suicide, a fantasy that, once again, extends from objective reality without any indication that it is all in Guido's imagination.
Fellini continues to play with an absurd tone until the very end of his film, but this tone reaches new heights during Guido's press conference. Here, Fellini plays up the notion of Guido's public as a series of "talking heads" by actually framing the reporters' bodies out of his shots, cropping them at the neck to emphasize the surreal, circus-like nature of his critics. Even as Fellini leans on this absurd tone, however, he balances it with a bleak, tragic tone. Abandoning his attempts to answer laughable questions like "Is pornography the most intense form of entertainment?" Guido eventually fantasizes about committing suicide. This transports him to a scene in which he watches as construction workers dismantle his set, the ultimate downfall of his artistic career. In the final scene, these bleak and absurdist tones mingle even more fluidly in the form of a circus-like procession of people from Guido's past and present. That everyone is dressed in white, marching in a circle (perhaps gesturing at the "circle of life") only contributes to the funereal yet playful feel of the scene.
Perhaps most importantly, this final stretch of the film resolves Guido's frustration with his artistic calling, tying into the themes of cinema and creativity that he has confronted throughout the film. In keeping with the overarching structure of the film, Daumier acts as the pessimistic narrator of Guido's failures in this scene, asserting that it is better to give up on making art than it is to arrogantly assume one's art is important to others. It takes this nihilistic outlook to make Guido realize that it is not perfection but imperfection that he must embrace in both his filmmaking and his love life. This satisfies the existential search that comprises Guido's character arc, thereby tying together several of the film's themes, including cinema, mortality, memory, and authenticity.
