Title: La Dolce Vita
Release Date: February 5, 1960
Director: Federico Fellini
Production Company: Riama Film | Pathé Consortium Cinéma | Gray Films
Summary/Review:
As I’ve been going through the Classic Movies project, there have been movies I haven’t enjoyed but always got a sense of why they’re considered classics. That is until a got to La Dolce Vita, a movie I struggled to watch because it seems to me to be a 3-hour slog of self-indulgence built around a character with no redeeming qualities. That character is Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a celebrity gossip writer living “the sweet life” rubbing shoulders with the cafe society, all the while being amoral, lecherous, and abusive.
The movie does not have a traditional plot but is more of a series of vignettes from Marcello’s life. Some critics break it down into a significant series of seven nights and seven dawns, while others say the numerology is not important. For me, it was a challenge to just see Marcello being awful again and again.
In these vignettes, we see Marcello:
- meet a wealthy woman, Maddalenna (Anouk Aimee), and take her to the flooded apartment of a prostitute where they presumably make love.
- discover that his girlfriend Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) has attempted suicide and drive her to hospital, and then attempt to call Maddalenna.
- welcome the famed Swedish actress who has made it big in Hollywood, Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) and follow her as she climbs the dome of St. Peter’s and has a party. Eventually the two end up in the Trevi Fountain, when the “magic” is broken by the sunrise. (The scenes of Sylvia wandering the narrow streets of Rome with a stray kitten on her head are some of my favorite in the movie).
- cover the media circus around an alleged sighting of the Madonna by two children, that ends with people trampled to death.
- attend a party at the home of his intellectual friend, Steiner (Alain Cuny), and have a philosophical conversation.
- take his father (Annibale Ninchi) out nightclubbing and have him go home with a dancer (only to seemingly suffer a heart attack).
- attend another party thrown by aristocrats at a castle where he meets Maddalenna again. She speaks to him from another room through an echo chamber and he all but promises to marry her as she makes out with another man.
- gets in a fight in the car with Emma, hits her, and abandons her on a roadside.
- gets called in when Steiner murders his children and kills himself and his to notify Steiner’s wife as his photographer friends swarm around.
- goes to yet another party where he tries to turn it into an “orgy” and humiliates some drunken women.
Rome has changed quite a bit in the 15 years since Rome, Open City, and much of this movie is filmed in newly constructed, modernist apartment blocks and public buildings. The rubble of the war is replaced by the rubble of construction sites. A theme of the movie is clearly the hollowness of modernity and the excess of the post war boom. Cinematically, La Dolce Vita is full of ingenious shots and great moments. I just wish it didn’t require spending so much time with such awful people.
The good news is that I have this extremely catchy tune, “Patricia,” stuck in my head.
Rating: **1/2
Panorama of the Mountains 