Federico Fellini
La Dolce Vita

Federico Fellini was cinema even just to hear him speak: his voice was always inspired, almost as if he were verbally describing the images that were passing through his mind at that moment. For no one like him, cinema was an irresistible need, a continuous artistic commitment, something exclusively personal and lyrical just as poetry is for the poet. American producers would have built golden bridges if he had shot a film in the United States, and there was always an unlimited budget available if he had agreed to direct a film based on the Divine Comedy. Yet Fellini always preferred to do things his way, in every sense.

Grotesque, visionary, baroque, dreamlike etc., etc., are definitions that do not fit the director from Rimini (thinking that today Tim Burton is considered the great visionary talent of Hollywood...). Fellini was "simply" a man of cinema, through and through, a cinematic set animal feeling at home only on set, getting emotional only if he could recreate the images he had in mind on that set, preferring an artificial sea made of plastic sheets and cranks to the real sea.

'La Dolce Vita' is the richest, most crowded, most disorderly fascinating, most intense, most choral, most vital, most "more" movie I have ever seen. Marcello is a failed writer who has turned to low-level journalism, the "gossip" kind, and spends his days to the rhythm of the sweet Roman life of the fifties. In the film, he is surrounded by many women: the "aggressive, maternal, sticky" Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noël, a nightclub dancer, the capricious billionaire Anouk Aimée, Valeria Ciangottini, sincere and angelic, the Fellinian-that-more-Fellinian-you-cannot-be Anita Ekberg, and many others who flirted with him, teased him, and had him even just for a night. Marcello is at the mercy of a Rome that seems like a modern Tower of Babel, moving carried by a river of nobles, photographers, models, momentary actors, dwarfs, and dancers, almost unconscious, drugged, leading a life where life emerges only in a few moments: when he watches Anita dancing in the Trevi Fountain; when he meets a fifteen-year-old from Umbria (Valeria Ciangottini) who works as a waitress in a trattoria on the Lazio coast where he has taken refuge to write; when he encounters Steiner (an unforgettable, etched-in-our-memory Alain Cuny) who speaks to him with a voice that has a calmness, a clarity, an ataraxia that seems alien to the deafening and entertaining chaos of the film.

Perhaps the most beautiful scene of the film is the evening at Steiner's house, where Marcello finds a safe haven to which he hopes to return more often, but where Fellini also plants the seed of doubt in the viewer about Steiner's complex, hidden personality: never in cinema have words been spoken that are so clear, heavy as boulders, with an eternal echo, as those Steiner confides to Marcello that evening. There is no real narrative thread, there is only Marcello and following him is the camera that becomes a witness to a degraded humanity (see the miracle sequence) from which the common man, the provincial worker, the inhabitant of an Italy now "prehistoric" (Marcello's father, Annibale Ninchi) flees horrified after being lured. Marcello will not manage to redeem himself; on the contrary, he will be pushed further downwards, suffer the loss of his friend Steiner, who committed suicide, and from the tightrope walker he was—perched between "la dolce vita" and a more authentic, sincere life—he will fall (definitively?) to the worse side. One last lifeline exists; it is the young waitress who from afar, on the beach, at the dawn of a new day, invites a disheveled Marcello, shattered by a night of senseless fun, to take a walk: Marcello is now distant, and the sound of the sea covers their voices.

Marcello Mastroianni (perhaps the greatest Italian cinema actor), simply immense, makes the leap in quality and from now on will become Fellini's alter ego.

An open film, with neither beginning nor end (Fellini hated this word), unrecoverable because irreducible to a text, "La Dolce Vita" is the film with which Fellini takes flight and launches two decades of masterpieces. It rivals with '8½' for the title of masterpiece of Fellini's filmography which, in reality, for coherence with the author's thoughts, should be considered a single, eternal film.