Year of Release: 1960Country of Origin: Italy, France
Director: Federico Fellini
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Alain Cuny, Walter Santesso
Plot outline: Young writer Marcello struggles to find his place in the world, torn between the allure of Rome's elite social scene and the stifling domesticity at home (IMDb).
La dolce vita received universal acclaim upon its release in 1960, and in retrospect it best represents its director. In this masterpiece, Federico Fellini achieved the ideal balance: between social observation and unconscious imagery, between artistic discipline and freedom, and between the neo-realism of 1950s Italian cinema and the orgiastic flights of his later work. In its time, it shocked people. The Catholic Church condemned it. It was considered a dirty movie because it was frank about sex and included nudity, albeit brief. Divine decadence may have been restricted under the Hollywood Production Code, but European filmmakers operated under no such constraint. Today, La dolce vita is hardly shocking, except that it's shockingly good. The movie's cautionary aspect is even emphasized by the passing years: Its empty glamour is not unlike our empty glamour, and its media and celebrity-drenched world is nothing compared to our own now. The moral journey that is "la dolce vita" is that of Marcello, a strangely passive man with intense but vague artistic and spiritual longings. It is Marcello's blessing and his curse that he's handsome enough to be passive. He just has to hang around in the right places -- on Rome's Via Venetia, mainly -- and life and women come to him. The movie's structure is audacious. At nearly three hours, it's made up almost entirely of disparate incidents, each covering an individual night and each ending at dawn. The unifying element is Marcello and his progress as a man. Fellini gambled that the incidents would be fascinating in and of themselves and that Marcello -- handsome but hopeless -- would be sympathetic and compelling. He was right. On many of Marcello's journeys, he's accompanied by aggressive photographer Paparazzo whose name in the plural became synonymous with heartless, intrusive celebrity parasites. La dolce vita is always two things at once: It's a wallow in decadence disguised as a moral saga, and it's a moral saga disguised as a wallow in decadence. It's always both, and that tension is always there, within the film and the filmmaker. Fellini critiques Roman decadence but offers no alternative but boredom; he exposes the frivolity and meaningless of it all, while offering no higher vision. Accordingly, the movie can be seen as an essentially despairing work, but it certainly doesn't feel that way, because the filmmaking is so exuberant. La dolce vita is a bittersweet masterpiece that grows more poignant with time (MLS)
My judgement: **** out of 4 stars
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