- It’s 1974. A 22 year old young gay man, Nicholas ('Nico'), an art student, rushes from London to Venice after his friend dies in mysterious circumstances.
- There he meets Danilo Donati, who is 48, and a talented film set designer, painter and costume creator. He is working with the famous Italian film director Federico Fellini on a new film Casanova. 'Fellini is the maestro, he is the magician’. Donati's problem is Fellini insists on constructing Venice settings on a studio lot, because he hates reality and loves imagination. Donati asks Nicholas to become his assistant. They indulge in frequent sex, which Laing describes in juicy detail.
- Nicholas’s job is to draw architectural details for the construction.
- They go to Rome, the production site for the film. The studio is the famous Cinecitta. Nico meets Fellini, an imposing man with a ‘big leonine head’. One of the pleasures of this novel is how deliciously Laing describes familiar Roman sites, ancient and modern - the Ponte Pietro Nenni, the Porta del Popolo, the Borghese gardens, the Pantheon, the Via Del Corso. Nico walks around, has coffees, fabulous desserts, and explores famous streets.
- Fellini is fussy about costumes and their costs. The cheaper the better. Elizabeth Taylor refused to wear them. As did Maria Callas. Donald Sutherland is the main actor in Casanova but Fellini hates him. The production process is very tense.
- When it concludes Nicholas and Danilo drive north to Lake Garda. The equally famous director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, is there. It's Salo, in the province of Brescia. Pasolini’s film is Salo, a version of 120 Days of Sodom.
- Salo is emotionally disturbing for both Danilo and Pasolini. It was where Fascism retreated after the war. The deposed Mussolini was rescued by the Germans and deposited there to run a puppet state. According to Dani, Pasolini is '..the most serious, the most soulful. The most radical. The deepest.'
- Nicholas’s parents discarded him because he was found in bed with another boy. ‘Fascism never really went away’ thinks Danilo.
- Pasolini writes in a newspaper article: ‘The intellectual courage to speak the truth and the practice of politics are two irreconcilable things in Italy'. He asserts the purity of the Italian Communist Party. ‘We are sleepwalkers like the children in Salo are sleepwalkers'. He attacks modernity '…consumerism is a new fascism because there is so much violence hidden inside it, because it destroys nature and natural behaviour…he is compelled to speak the truth’.
- Pasolini pays the ultimate price for his passionate beliefs. One morning the radio announces he has been beaten and run over. He’s dead.
- Nico realises 'most people, not Pasolini, are ruled by fear’.
- Olivia Laing has written an absorbing and fascinating work featuring two giants in the history of film. The novel is a fictional rendering enriched by deep emotion and insight and beautifully written. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
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