Petronius, 20%; Fellini, 80%

There's an enormous platter of live black eels in an inky sauce, and that's only the hors d'oeuvres. As the guests seat themselves at the banquet, their hostess urinates in a silver chamber pot. Slaves stumble over garbage-strewn floors bearing trays of delicacies from some gastronomic apocalypse: a white calf wearing a brass helmet, cows' udders aswim in a mucid green sauce. It is a picnic in the best traditions of ancient Rome and Federico Fellini, designed and executed for Satyricon, his first full-length film in four years. It may be the most glorious bacchanal in the history of the cinema. At its opening last week at the Venice Film Festival, that promise seemed to be fulfilled. The normally reserved press corps gave the film a five-minute ovation, and the first-night audience was equally wide-eyed. Wrote one critic: "Satyricon is like an Atlantis that has emerged from .the deepest roots of the soul to mark the return of Fellini."

As in Spirits of the Dead, Fellini used the original source only as inspirational material. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter was a pornographic satire written by Nero's whoremonger, a raucous tale of two worldly youths moving through the decaying strata of Roman society. Fellini lifted all of the characters but just a single episode from the book. The result, announces the director with a characteristically immodest shrug, "is about 20% Petronius and 80% Fellini."

The book has been on his mind for 30 years. In 1939 he attempted to stage it as an anti-Fascist parody. But Fellini scholars who enjoy tracing autobiographical ghosts through the master's films may find that Satyricon is a dead end. "This is my most tiring film," Fellini admitted after completing a hectic three months of editing. "It is more anguishing than La Dolce Vita because that had reality. Satyricon is made from an unknown point of view. I have invented everything myself, a universe out of my mind. There is nothing where I recognize myself. If anything, it is a kind of auto-destruction." Novelist-Critic Alberto Moravia recognized some of the old Fellini trademarks however: monstrous old people, perverse youth populating "an antique world in which decadence and death gradually drown and destroy the senses."

Relevant Antiquity. Fellini and Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (who also shot Toby Dammit) used tons of smoke, incense and cement dust to reproduce a sense of murky antiquity. Yet there is little doubt that, in scenes like the death of a patrician couple who prefer suicide to inevitable political assassination, Fellini is attempting to render this vast fresco as a giant metaphor for the 1960s. "If Petronius' work is a full-blooded description of the atmosphere of those times," Fellini admits, "the film that I adapted from it is a panorama, an allegorical satire of our present-day world. It is a science-fiction film projected into the past, not the future, a journey into the unknown. But it is not an erotic picture."

Perhaps not, but it is already a sensational one. Although American audiences will have to wait until winter to see Satyricon, the Venice showing was so wildly popular that festival tickets, normally 2,000 lire ($3.20), were being sold on the black market at 60,000 lire (about $100) apiece. "Well," Fellini explained gleefully, "I think that every Italian is a pagan at heart."

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