Federico Fellini
La Dolce Vita

That evening, at the Capitol cinema in Milan, everyone was there. It was February 5, 1960. A film set in Rome (but speaking of Italy as a whole, and thus hardly regional) was being shown for the first time in a very large cinema in the center of the Lombard capital. At the end of the screening, but even during it, all hell broke loose. Fellini was already an important name in Italian cinema, with two Oscars under his belt ("La Strada", 1954; "Le notti di Cabiria", 1957), and a couple of notable successes, including "I Vitelloni", 1953. He had been inactive for three years, during which, struggling with producer De Laurentiis, he had written, along with Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, the screenplay for "La Dolce Vita". That evening, as mentioned, all hell broke loose: the work did not please the moralists of the time, the bigoted Christian Democrats (a young Oscar Luigi Scalfaro wrote a venomous article in the Osservatore Romano titled "La schifosa vita"), the women in furs, the bishops and the clergy who threatened to excommunicate anyone who went to the cinema to see, in their words, such an abomination. Fellini was pushed and covered with boos and spit, Mastroianni faced a couple of insults, among which "Comunista di merda!" stood out; a gentleman, particularly upset, challenged the director to a duel (a real duel, with swords) to repay the offenses he claimed to have suffered watching the film; the archbishop of Milan, the future Pope Paul VI, refused to meet the crew, and a lynching was only avoided thanks to the prompt intervention of the law enforcement. The cast members, quietly, fled out of the cinema and returned to Rome (bravely, three years later, Fellini accepted to return to Milan, to a different cinema, to present "8 1/2"). The damage was done, the media frenzy was unleashed, and even the God-fearing Italy of the early decade understood that this film was something significant, and defying excommunication (which, moreover, was impossible, and had already been hinted at by the Catholic world two years earlier because of the scandalous "Peyton Place") filled the theaters and made "La Dolce Vita" one of the greatest commercial successes of all time (about 15 million Italians went to the cinema), paving the way for major international accolades, including the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Oscar nominations (only one hit, for Piero Gherardi's costumes). Italy is known worldwide also thanks to works like these, which launched trends and sayings (paparazzo, dolce vita, Marcello, come here), made Mastroianni one of the few international Italian stars, launched the prosperous Anita Ekberg and gave Fellini the status of a full-fledged auteur, which until then, despite previous films, had not been granted to him.

De Laurentiis turned pale when he read the screenplay: too much material, too much confusion. Indeed, "La Dolce Vita" is a film that wants to recount the great change Italy was undergoing in those years, from a peasant land to an economic boom, from poverty to well-being, from useful things to useless ones. The film does not have a real plot, it proceeds by accumulation of situations: the protagonist, journalist Marcello, enters one situation, exits another, only to re-enter again, as one critic wrote: "[...] Marcello witnesses this and that situation, all work material, but he never works. He leaves a party to go to a meeting. Nothing good will come of it. But there's always the next episode". Rome, and Italy, are seen as a Babel of languages and voices, of people and myths that are born in the morning and end in the evening, of phenomena, today we would say social, beautifully concluded in less than 24 hours (and it is an incredible modernity of a film that, conceptually, seems to be written today), a Sodom and Gomorrah in which there are no longer fathers or morals, but only the desire to amaze, to go beyond the usual, yet, paradoxically, nothing amazes anymore.

The advertisements of the time, not satisfied with the success the film was achieving, spoke of orgies and sinful sex scenes. Obviously, there is no such thing, but there are parties, stripteases (very chaste ones) and thus the representation of something that indeed existed, that of a bored bourgeoisie never really busy during the day that came out at night and indulged in the hedonistic pleasures of life, among (some) nudity and a lot, a whole lot of boredom. And it launched Via Veneto which became, in a short time, the set for every world cinematography. In practice, all the stars of the time dreamed more of spending nights in Rome on Via Veneto than on Fifth Avenue, which Fellini meticulously had reconstructed in a studio.

"Rome was no longer that of Antonio Ricci trying to steal a bicycle or of Umberto D living on alms, but that of Via Veneto, just as that Rome, just as the films, were thus for Fellini a continuous game, the possibility of delaying serious things and the entry into the world of grown-ups" (Pino Farinotti)

"A subject for a news magazine transfigured into epic" (Morando Morandini)

There is the long sequence of the contrived miracle of the Madonna that attracts half of Rome to the court of a charlatan, with television crews in tow (and really here we are in the midst of the present); the intellectual Steiner incapable of understanding the new times and destined to suicide (which indeed he will commit); and a finale among the most poetic, and saddest, in the entire history of cinema. On a beach in Fregene, after a kind of squalid and vulgar night orgy, Marcello sees again a girl, the only human being in the entire film, whom he had seen, by chance, a few days before. She tells him something, but due to the sound of the sea, he does not hear her. It ends like this, our protagonist is destined to spend his life moving from one squalor to another, beauty cannot touch him.

A magnificent and poetic film, one of Fellini's highest achievements and, personally, my favorite. Because it speaks of a time close to us, very close, even if it seems distant, very distant.