Federico Fellini
La Dolce Vita

La dolce vita.

A film that has entered the legend of both Italian and international cinema.

Fellini.

I don't know where to start in describing this 3-hour (!) film … so full of details, ideas, reflections, content, and why not, “flaws”.

So let's say I start from the beginning. And let's also say there will be various spoilers (but you've seen it, haven't you?) for a film that doesn't have a plot but lives on episodes and details, so describing them will somehow reveal them to you.

The opening scene is nothing short of wonderful: a helicopter transports a statue of Christ hanging below it and secured with cables. A huge flying Christ soars over the skies of Rome. Semi-naked girls (the first sweetnesses of life in la dolce vita) sunbathe on the terrace of a high-end Roman penthouse and wave at the helicopter pilots, saying bye-bye with their hand. The passenger next to them is Marcello Mastroianni, who in the film is named after him: Marcello.

Marcello is a tabloid journalist. He and his entourage of paparazzi are always in the right place at the right time to flash the current VIP, who might be drunk or with a lover.

Marcello knows the right people, he insinuates himself everywhere.

The famous American actress is arriving, and he will be the one to show her around. Anita Ekberg. A stunning, statuesque, unreachable beauty. A blonde goddess. Fellini and women, indeed. This is his most beautiful and famous one. Marcello is like anesthetized in front of her. Let's say mesmerized, dazed. He says something to her like You are everything… you are wife, lover, friend, sister, mother and God only knows what else. This episode (for better or worse, it's a film of episodes, as I’ve already mentioned, and Marcello is always in the middle) is somewhat the symbol of the film. Anita's bath in the Trevi Fountain is pure Fellini, it's the magic of cinema, it's a dream.

Before that, there's that wild dance and then her perpetually drunk boyfriend, also an actor is this the guy who played Tarzan? and then oh, there's even a young 22-year-old Celentano singing in his famous made-up English. Three thousand things, and not even half an hour has passed.

Oh, and before this episode, there's the one (for me among the most beautiful) of Marcello and the billionaire with the black eye, with her spaceship-like car, who pick up a middle-aged Roman prostitute, take her to her home (a real hovel), and have sex (Marcello and the rich woman) in her bedroom while the prostitute makes them coffee and maybe drops two sacks.

How do I proceed now? I write spontaneously, but it's an intermittent flow, like a faulty faucet with air inside, spurting dirty water, gurgling, and then stopping. This film is too demanding, I'm not up to it … oh but who cares, let's move on.

The content.

LA DOLCE VITA.

It's the title, yes, it's basically the main theme or maybe not, maybe it's just that it's redundant, it takes up a large chunk of these 174 minutes. And that "dolce" is obviously bitterly ironic. There's nothing sweet in watching four jerks in tuxedos and four bitches in fur coats and jewels, always bored, half-drunk, apathetic between canapés and champagne, between whiskies and cigarettes while watching curious performances that, for this crowd that has everything, need to be weird … constantly monitored and cared for by servile workers (the inferiors) and suck-up families eager to jump the fence to get bored themselves.

The redundancy we mentioned. We will often see these VIPs, rich people, captains of industry, more or less fallen nobles. Parties, soirees, salons, empty chatter, assorted oddities, reiterated, insisted upon. I was quite bored, the final party with a drunk, slurring, and unpleasant Mastroianni is half a mess. I say it without any fear, after all, it's just my opinion. Mastroianni isn't believable, he acts poorly, I didn't like him at all … when someone grabs him by the neck it's all fake and poorly done, only the stripper's act is worthwhile.

But maybe Federico did it on purpose to repeat certain things. Perhaps his goal was precisely to make us overly nauseated … perhaps he wanted us to fully understand that when you become rich, filthy rich, you end up living a really shitty life.

A disorienting film, because it doesn’t give any certainty, it never concludes. A circular film without beginning or end. Tremendously disorienting, I wouldn’t recommend it to those too young; some things should be learned on your own skin, gradually, living … if Fellini tells them all at once I don't know if it's a good thing.

Oh God, it is true though that if a youngster sees this film … if he’s honest and no more than moderately intelligent and sensitive, he’ll end up, at a minimum, really bored …

But in all this boredom, there are sequences to tear your skin out. Marcello and Maddalena (the billionaire with the car from before) in the castle. He seated on a throne, she speaking to him from another room but he doesn't know where she is … and what they say, ladies and gentlemen. Rethinking la dolce vita and thinking of “The Great Beauty” (which takes a lot of inspiration from la dolce vita,/copies too much, poorly here and there) makes you say … oh Sorrentino, shove that oscar up your ass … who told you to do it? yes, alright you got the Oscar but you're a sellout. You were so good as an author in your first two films … the Americans even tried to buy Fellini, they offered him the world but he refused, he wanted to do his own thing …

THE MEANING OF LIFE

It is even a Bergmanian film because it seeks to provide answers to the meaning of life or how one should live, fleeing most of all from rhetoric and hypocrisy, with detachment, from superior beings, to avoid suffering … and it is Steiner, Marcello's fascinating alter ego, who will say these things in a memorable monologue.

The wisest man then, the most cultured and elevated that we will see in this vast gallery of characters. However, he will also be the one who kills his two children and then kills himself. Shocking.

CRITIQUE OF RELIGION

The sequence of the two children saying they saw the Virgin Mary. the press, tv, radio, everyone is there for the coverage. The mad crowd like in Lourdes brings their sick and asks for miracles but by dawn, a sick person will die, after a night of rain, with exploding quartz. A frenzy. It is a fierce critique of religion, a theme already proposed by Fellini three years earlier in "Le Notti di Cabiria" in the scene of the pilgrimage to Divino Amore, but I appreciated the former more, where the futility and mystification of religious belief slowly appear in Cabiria's eyes, who went on the pilgrimage faithfully hoping to have one of her desires answered through prayer: to stop being a prostitute … although in la dolce vita the sequence is more spectacular and overflowing, just think of people going mad over the trees to tear off "miraculous" branches.

HE, SHE, LOVE

And then there's Emma, the crazy (and perpetually cuckolded) girlfriend of Marcello. She represents the one who loves you, the better half that without a woman, what is life? Another memorable scene. Emma and Marcello will tell us everything, at night, stopped with the car in the middle of the countryside.

Marcello will reveal himself for what he truly is … restless, dissatisfied, melancholic, unable to love and decide … and will hurl his epitaph at her in a fierce and corrosive je-accuse. But at dawn, they will sleep together again …

SELF-REALIZATION

It is in this aspect, a crucial point for every man, that Marcello struggles, defeated from the start because he is precisely the symbol of uncertainty, of not knowing what he wants, the tragedy of modern man. He will always be at the center of the film, now Charon, now a passenger on a tram called desire, ensnared in chaos, tossed around in a delirious and inconclusive parade.

FATHER AND SON

Another episode. One evening Marcello's dad will arrive and they will party at the nightclub: champagne, the French dancer, the dwarf with the trumpet and balloons. His father was never around; he was always traveling when Marcello was a child. I don’t know my father … here … instead Marcello, in this episode, is very credible. He reveals a little piece of himself, his incompleteness perhaps also due to a paternal love he never had. Stay dad, don't leave, stay in Rome for a few more days …

PURITY

It's the girl from the seaside restaurant, how cute you are, turn to the side, yes like that, you look like a little angel, a painting … she is entrusted with the final shot. She who smiles, she who recognizes Marcello on the beach, that Marcello who had previously stopped at the restaurant with his typewriter.

She waves at him and speaks to him from afar. He is drunk, hears nothing, doesn't recognize her, the sound of the sea drowns everything … so much distance between Marcello and purity. She is not troubled, continues to smile, indulgent.

Curtain.

It is she who is la dolce vita …