Flair and Square: The first woman
Anita Ekberg, who passed away recently, was called “the first woman on the day of creation”.
Blonde and big-eyed Ekberg was, of course, beautiful by convention.When you start watching foreign films as an older teen or a young 20-year-old, you begin with Federico Fellini. When you watch Fellini, you begin with his most famous movie, La Dolce Vita. When you watch La Dolce Vita, all you remember is Sylvia Rank, the role immortalised by Anita Ekberg.
Ekberg, who died on Sunday in her adopted country Italy, is tightly entrenched in our collective consciousness as Fellini’s Sylvia. Her introductory scene — when Marcello Mastroianni follows her across cobbled Rome to find her wading in the beauteous Trevi Fountain — remains among the most iconic scenes in movie history.
Blonde and big-eyed Ekberg was, of course, beautiful by convention. But to take the attention away from the sumptuous sculpture of the large Trevi — let’s just say it was her black strapless gown barely holding together her 39-22-37 size that did it. She was called “the first woman on the day of creation”.
Ekberg was so ridiculously sexy, this scene had offended the Vatican. To which she had quipped, “I am very proud of my breasts, as every woman should be. It’s not cellular obesity, it’s womanliness.” With that, she intellectualised a woman’s sexuality as only a Swede could.
She had other gems, like this one: “It was I who made Fellini famous, not the other way around”.
But Fellini’s casting of a woman of such lushness as a leading lady was moot. Heroines were of course supposed to be pretty and sexy, but not distracting from the film and certainly not from the hero (in this case, Marcello Mastroianni, the most famous actor in Italy).
I can’t think of many female actors who’d be allowed such abandon in a leading role. That privilege was reserved for the vamp, or the ‘item girl’. Heroines were who you took home to meet ma, not fantasised about taking to bed. Rekha and Karisma Kapoor turn from simpletons to sex goddesses after their husbands try to murder them or have an affair. Zeenat Aman had to be a tribal woman to showcase her ample bosom. And Mandakini is punished with abandonment.
Possibly the only sex goddess as leading lady has been Urmila Matondkar in Rangeela. Her waiflike seduction and Manish Malhotra’s itsy Barbie dresses were the perfect antidote to Aamir Khan’s popularity and Jackie Shroff’s handsomeness. And is it safe to say today that
Ms Matondkar made Ram Gopal Varma and not the other way around?
There were other sex symbols in cinema, like Marilyn Monroe. But Ekberg tipped the scales in her favour when she said in an interview a handful of years ago that Monroe was so remembered because she died so young. “I’d like to see what she would look like now if she was alive,” she said. She had a point.
Ekberg had a very short career, she’s barely remembered for films other than La Dolce Vita. To think, she was an international icon and a cinematic legend only for one scene ever — a sensuous black gown that revealed more than it concealed. Such is the power of style.
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