La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition) Review
Federico Fellini's widescreen 1960 B&W masterpiece, LA DOLCE VITA (literally "The Sweet Life") has turned fifty years old, but despite some inevitable anachronisms, its themes of the double-binding alienation of modern man from the agrarian past and also from the predations of oppressive high technology, still ring true.
**SPOILERS** The film does not display the usual cinematic three-act plot arc; instead, it follows seven days and seven nights in the peripatetic career of feckless, dissatisfied Marcello Rubini the note-taking gossip columnist (Marcello Mastroanni). In 1960, Rome's Via Veneto was THE place to see and be seen among the international "Jet Set," a term just coming into use for the elite aggregate of Italian paparazzi, Britishers seeking tax haven, visiting millionaires, celebrities and the just-plain-rich. Sidewalk cafes, cabarets, double-parked cars and Beautiful People jam the Veneto well into the night. Already Marcello is tired of chasing celebs for a living and hopes to elevate himself by climbing the journalistic ladder or becoming in some way a serious and accomplished writer. But for now, he and his buddy the photojournalist Paparazzo (origin of the term "paparazzi," plural) have to chase with the rest of them. Off-duty, Marcello rents for the night a dingy bedroom from a prostitute just to have (probably unsuccessful) sex with old acquaintance Maddalena (Anouk Aimee), to the consternation of his faithful but frustrated girlfriend Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), who attempts suicide.
Next morning, Marcello joins an enthusiastic press corps at the airport to greet a busty blonde American sex bomb, Sylvia (played to the hilt by Anita Ekberg), who is both a handful and a headache. Marcello is immediately struck by this vision and follows her around all day, even humoring her to scrounge milk for a stray kitten in the middle of the night (think of Charlize Theron's marvelous star turn as a spoiled starlet vis-à-vis medical echinacea in Woody Allen's 1998 CELEBRITY). But a payoff starts to emerge: in one of the many iconic scenes from this movie, a fully-clad but very bosomy Sylvia splashes in the Trevi Fountain, and she is probably sexier in a dress than nude. Marcello joins her in the water and they're about to click, but - the moment passes.
The Roman Catholic Church had a hissy when this film came out. The opening sequence, which shows an enormous concrete figure of Christ hauled by helicopter(!) into Rome, practically defines the modern secular meaning of the word "iconic." We cut directly to a pseudo-Balinese dance in a nightclub. Fellini was probably what today would be called a "Christian Humanist," but in no way an orthodox Roman Catholic. In juxtaposing Christ with Buddha, Fellini may be implying that if religion is show biz and show biz is religion, is there that much of a difference? Later, Marcello bumps into an old friend, the intellectual Steiner, in a church. This is not an old cathedral redolent of moisture, stone and incense, but a modern church with an almost fascist severity of façade and rows of uniform wooden pews, not benches or seats. One can practically smell the lemon furniture polish. Although Steiner is on good terms with the priest, it seems to him that religion is simply a matter of finding a good organ on which to play Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor. In a later sequence, when two little children sight an alleged Madonna, the scene quickly turns into a media circus, with a mob of people turned out in curiosity and klieg lights in abundance for newsreel and TV. Marcello, notebook at the ready as always, is told by a priest that miracles do not occur under such riotous circumstances. This seems to be closer to Fellini's own sentiments.
Marcello and Emma are invited to a salon at Steiner's in what will be Marcello's first of three attempts to break into what he imagines is a better, more creative class of people whose lives are accomplished and meaningful. At Steiner's, Emma and Marcello both admire their host's civilized living room full of books and music, his pretty wife and adorable children. But afterward in a private tete-a-tete, Steiner admits that he could work his contacts at the newspapers and help set Marcello up with a salaried job that would leave him free time for deeper, more personal writing, but Steiner begs Marcello not to work for those "half-fascist" dailies. Steiner then shocks Marcello by confessing that he considers himself a failure, lacking the passion to be an amateur or the discipline to be an intellectual. It also seems that the artists at Steiner's salon of the supposed artistic elite from many fields are mostly poseurs, divided about evenly between those who do not speak and are thought fools, and those who do speak and remove any doubt. All this is a tremendous letdown to Marcello, who had idolized Steiner and considered them "friends" although they had had only four or five previous meetings. While Steiner relates his personal bleakness, the camera holds him and Marcello in tight shot. Mastroanni's brilliant underacting, not to mention his expressive face, registers first respect for Steiner but then the respect turns to chagrin, pity, disillusionment and ultimately some of Steiner's own depression and despair.
Two nights later Marcello -- sans Emma -- winds up in a high-class party full of rich people, high-toned British (complete with smelly dogs!) and faded aristocracy, set in a 500-year-old palazzo. While superficially admiring the edifice's architecture and artworks, the novelty-crazed guests get involved with a séance while Marcello almost gets into a necking session with flirtatious Maddalena. Almost. Later that same night/early a.m. Marcello and Emma get into a howling fight about Marcello's infidelity that apparently won't stop until they receive word that Steiner had deliberately sent his wife out on an errand, then killed his children and himself. Despite having heard a confession by Steiner of his personal unhappiness, Marcello is devasted by the news and Emma cannot but empathize with him.
The following night Marcello and an acquaintance from the Via Veneto join a mixed bag of glitterati as they crash a party (literally, the host was not at home and one interloper had to break a window to let them all in). These self-invited "guests" try rather desperately to sound informed and with-it, but who settle for small talk and cheap home theatrics fueled by lots of liquor: a couple of gay guys do the Can-Can to a speeded-up version of "Jingle Bells"; and in another of those iconic scenes from this movie, a divorcee (played beautifully by Magali Noel) does a strip-tease to a record of Perez Prado's "Patricia." Marcello tries to organize a proper orgy, but once again the elements do not quite come together. The film ends with yet another daybreak, as the dissolute partygoers find their way to a nearby beach to see a "monster" (monstro), probably an enormous dead manta ray. An adolescent girl with whom Marcello once had a chat beckons him to come and see her, but a channel of the sea provides partial physical and aural barriers. Marcello smiles wearily, shrugs, waves and then goes back to the showy mob he has learned to despise, and to whose company he is condemned.
LA DOLCE VITA is a film full of ironies, right from its title (nothing about Marcello's life is "sweet"). Fellini abhorred the predations of mass media: photographers and would-be pilgrims stampede what they think is the sight of a miracle, destroying any evidence in the process. Marcello's social and professional climbing does pay off, but usually when he gets there he is still dissatisfied; for him there is no there "there," so to speak. Where are the verities? In what is the film's single most tragic irony, his career advances because of Steiner's suicide. In order to identify the body, the police let him up the stairs into Steiner's flat and in climbing those stairs, he passes a number of fellow journalists. I am indebted to film critic Richard Shickel's remark, in the film's very good Commentary track, that Marcello spatially and symbolically "gets above" the others on his way up "to the top." Perhaps part of Marcello's misfortune was making an idol of a man whose hobby was recording tape-recorded nature sounds, like thunderstorms or birds--blatant symbolism of an ongoing Fellinian theme, modern man's alienation from nature. And of course, Marcello's case is the irony of diminishing returns: the more he pursues truth and verity, the farther away he seems to get.
LA DOLCE VITA is not at heart a film about social climbing and career success as in the previous year's film ROOM AT THE TOP. It is more existential: a search for meaning. Marcello's impotence mirrors his unhappiness at life: he can't "get it up" to enthusiastically commit to anything, not even a pretty and adoring girlfriend. Like the polyglot partygoers Marcello hangs with over the course of the week, he can't "get off" by achieving any satisfaction artistically or intellectually. Like Steiner, he realizes he has neither the talent nor the discipline to become a serious writer. An extended sequence during which Marcello's father visits Rome helps us understand that Marcello would never return to his one-horse-town past, none of the old agrarian life for him, but that his present situation is untenable. Marcello literally tries sex, booze and rock'n'roll, but nothing gets to him. He had hopes that a more serious job will put him in touch with serious things, but by film's end if not before, we know things won't work this way for him.
Enough time has passed between the film's international premiere and now that we may be in danger of forgetting its influence. The film played around the world and in so doing made an internationally known director of Fellini and an international star of Marcello Mastroanni, some of whose later roles were similarly disaffected, very "Marcello-ish." A handsome but feckless leading man with a distinct anti-heroish streak was unheard of by most American moviegoers of the time, whose top movie males included stalwarts like John Wayne, Kirk Douglas and Charleton Heston. The boozy private parties that descend into vituperation and self-loathing anticipate such later plays and movies as THE BOYS IN THE BAND and WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLFE? Fellini's deliberate visual oxymorons, particularly the clash of the ancient and agrarian versus the ultramodern and high-tech (such as a tiny nun in a wimple pacing the Brutalist basement of a hospital, or Jesus-hauled-by-Bell Helicopter) hammer home the theme of alienation, but such tonic wit and visual audacity amuse as well.
[sidebar: Perhaps no recent American film has been more informed by LA DOLCE VITA than Woody Allen's 1998 CELEBRITY. Similar themes and plot techniques emerge: the equation of organized religion and show business, the spoiled and adored starlet whom the journalist will do almost anything to please, the search for a coherent life in general. CELEBRITY's central figure (Kenneth Branagh) plays a Woody-Allenish nebbish who lacks Marcello's charm but is also a stringer journalist who says he wants to write that One Big Book, but in reality is obsessed by style, wasting too much of his energy chasing starlets and maintaing an aging, temperamental Aston-Martin. CELEBRITY also has a life-affirming rabbi who inexplicably commits suicide, without even as much foreshadowing as Fellini had given us.]
All the major players in LA DOLCE VITA are excellently cast and well played, including former Tarzan Lex Barker as a boozy American actor who has unresolved issues with Sylvia. But ultimately it is Mastroanni's movie, and he played it so well that he became not only an international star, but virtually a symbol of modern (or, if you will, European) disillusionment and anomie. It is to Fellini's and the actor's credit that the Marcello character retains some sympathy even while behaving abominably, registering minimal concern at his girlfriend's suicide attempt, and trying to two- (or is is three?) time her by pursuing cosmetically beautiful women of whom he knows little or nothing. Since there is no unified, three-act structure to this movie, but more of a picaresque form, we count on Marcello to keep us concerned for him and wondering what is to come.
A few words as well to Nino Rota's witty musical score, which blends some innovative new "ultramodern" music (his word) performed on pre-Moog synthesizer instruments with new compositions for a standard movie orchestra, adding quotations from his prior work and American pop music, such as "Ma, He's Making Eyes at Me," "Stormy Weather" and most notably Perez Prado's campy Fifties Mambo, "Patricia." The one-disc Criterion DVD extras are slim but good; they include yellow subtitles and Richard Shickel's commentary track. (Even before I fell for this movie I figured out that the bells-and-whistles of the deluxe two-disc version made the ensemble more satisfying, and worth the extra money.) I only wish Shickel had said more about the production values of this film other than that Fellini used the massive Cinecitta complex on the edge of Rome, and (lovely surprise!) that the impressive and well-photographed studio set of the Via Veneto is flat, which makes for great tracking shots, even though the real Veneto traverses some of Rome's steepest hills. But this should not obscure the fact that LA DOLCE VITA is an outstanding film. In fact, it came to this reviewer's shock at his first viewing that he had watched a nearly three-hour movie without checking the time or becoming bored. I do realize that while most people like this film, some fans are more passionate about it than others; I can only recommend seeing the film first, and then the odds are quite good you'll want to splurge on the deluxe edition at hand (July 2010). LA DOLCE VITA is a film that I, for one, intend to see again and again.
La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition) Overview
A journalist investigates the life-styles of Roman high society and is sickened and fascinated by what he discovers.
La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition) Specifications
At three brief hours, La Dolce Vita, a piece of cynical, engrossing social commentary, stands as Federico Fellini's timeless masterpiece. Arich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini (extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence. A man of paradoxical emotional juxtapositions (cool but tortured, sexy but impotent), he dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticizes finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Instead, he engages in an ménage à trois, then frolics in a fountain with a giggling American starlet (bombshell Anita Ekberg), and in the film's unforgettably inspired finale, attends a wild orgy that ends, symbolically, with its participants finding a rotting sea animal while wandering the beach at dawn. Fellini saw his film as life affirming (thus its title, The Sweet Life), but it's impossible to take him seriously. While Mastroianni drifts from one worldly pleasure to another, be it sex, drink, glamorous parties, or rich foods, they are presented, through his detached eyes, are merely momentary distractions. His existence, an endless series of wild evenings and lonely mornings, is ultimately soulless and facile. Because he lacks the courage to change, Mastroianni is left with no alternative but to wearily accept and enjoy this "sweet" life. --Dave McCoy
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