La Dolce Vita

Today I'd like to review a film that I have seen many times and love very much, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita. La Dolce Vita is more epic in scale, and more socially conscious in temperament, than Fellini’s other masterwork: 8 1/2. Here, Marcello is emblematic of the great cultural malaise gripping the Italian elite. The lavish materialistic attractions of the day prove ultimately unfulfilling, Fellini asserts, as “la dolce vita” is anything but sweet. The film references the sociopsychological drift of the Art Cinema, but places it in a specific context: the fashionable gentry of Rome. Modern aggravations of note within the film include the prevalence of the paparazzi, who symbolize an infuriating intrusiveness on the part of the media. Marcello himself is a journalist, a successful one, who’s work is criticized and feared by those he spends time with. Another intrusion seems to be American culture, the English language particularly, and the sort of childish but sensual exuberance, characterized by Anita Ekberg’s Sylvia. The notion of the traditional domestic life serving as a strangling, so to speak, a caging device, is one introduced by Marcello’s friend Steiner, who’s brutal tragedy indicates a resolution of the film’s exploration concerning the hidden realities of apparently ideal familial relations. However, the incident could be understood as having resulted from Steiner’s sense of intellectualism, though he explicitly bemoans his relative imprisonment. This is consequential because Marcello discusses, at several junctures, his interest in literature, expressly as contrasted against his journalistic writings, suggesting a desire for greater intellectualism, or greater artistic involvement and acclaim. Familiar Fellinian discourse concerning religion, media, and love (especially as sought out in terms of mistresses and lovers) play major roles within the narrative, though all seem to fail, in Marcello’s estimation, in the enterprise of lending meaning to his life. 

Ultimately, Marcello serves as a guide, exhibiting both himself, his ideologies, and those prevailing within his social circles, those which comprised the upper echelon of Rome’s aristocracy. Fellini has identified that which is paradoxical, or ironic, or fundamentally corrupt, about each of the institutions he has chosen to explore (religion, family, high society, media), and depicted it in a manner both engrossing and repelling, alluring but grotesque. His showman’s instinct is herein superb, with the performances at the Cha-Cha-Cha Club coming to mind, and of course the final degradation of Marcello in the seaside villa (not to mention Anita Ekberg’s traipse through the Trevi Fountain). Marcello’s grace and gallantry cannot pass unmentioned, and the enchanting sophistication of Anouk Aimee’s Maddalena illustrates Fellini’s ability to transform his actors (considering Aimee’s character in  8 1/2 as Marcello’s spurned wife). 

In all, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is masterful - exciting, intelligent, sumptuous, critical and profound, capturing the joie de vivre of Italy’s beau monde and positing a certain relation between it and cinema’s pervasive ennui.