Question: Who directed the movie La Dolce Vita?
Answer: Federico Fellini

La Dolce Vita (; Italian for "the sweet life" or "the good life")  is a 1960 Italian comedy-drama film directed and co-written by Federico Fellini. The film follows Marcello Rubini, a journalist writing for gossip magazines, over seven days and nights on his journey through the "sweet life" of Rome in a fruitless search for love and happiness. La Dolce Vita won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival  and the Oscar for Best Costumes,  and remains one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time.

Plot

Based on the most common interpretation of the storyline,  the film can be divided into a prologue, seven major episodes interrupted by an intermezzo, and an epilogue (see also Structure, below). If the evenings of each episode were joined with the morning of the respective preceding episode together as a day, they would form seven consecutive days, which may not necessarily be the case.

Prologue

1st Day Sequence:
A helicopter transports a statue of Christ over an ancient Roman aqueduct outside Rome while a second, Marcello Rubini's news helicopter, follows it into the city. The news helicopter is momentarily sidetracked by a group of bikini-clad women sunbathing on the rooftop of a high-rise apartment building. Hovering above, Marcello uses gestures to elicit phone numbers from them but fails in his attempt then shrugs and continues on following the statue into Saint Peter's Square.

Episode 1

1st Night Sequence: Marcello meets Maddalena by chance in an exclusive nightclub. A beautiful and wealthy heiress, Maddalena is tired of Rome and constantly in search of new sensations while Marcello finds Rome suits him as a jungle he can hide in. They make love in the bedroom of a prostitute to whom they had given a ride home in Maddalena’s Cadillac.

1st Dawn Sequence: Marcello returns to his apartment at dawn to find that his fiancée, Emma, has overdosed. On the way to the hospital, he declares his everlasting love to her and again as she lies in a semiconscious state in the emergency room. While waiting frantically for her recovery, however, he tries to make a phone call to Maddalena.

Episode 2

2nd Day Sequence: That day, he goes on assignment for the arrival of Sylvia, a famous Swedish-American actress, at Ciampino airport where she is met by a horde of news reporters.

During Sylvia's press conference, Marcello calls home to ensure Emma has taken her medication while reassuring her that he is not alone with Sylvia. After the film star confidently replies to the barrage of journalists' questions, her boyfriend Robert (Lex Barker) enters the room late and drunk.  To Sylvia's producer, Marcello casually recommends that Sylvia be taken on a tour of St Peter's.

Inside St Peter's dome, a news reporter complains that Sylvia is "an elevator" because none of them can match her energetic climb up the numerous flights of stairs. Inspired, Marcello maneuvers forward to be alone with her when they finally reach the balcony overlooking the Vatican.

2nd Night Sequence: That evening, the infatuated Marcello dances with Sylvia in the Baths of Caracalla. Sylvia's natural sensuality triggers raucous partying while Robert, her bored fiancé, draws caricatures and reads a newspaper. His humiliating remark to her causes Sylvia to leave the group, eagerly followed by Marcello and his paparazzi colleagues. Finding themselves alone, Marcello and Sylvia spend the rest of the evening in the alleys of Rome where they wade into the Trevi Fountain.

2nd Dawn Sequence: Like a magic spell that has suddenly been broken, dawn arrives at the very moment Sylvia playfully "anoints" Marcello's head with fountain water. They drive back to Sylvia's hotel to find an enraged Robert waiting for her in his car. Robert slaps Sylvia, orders her to go to bed, and then assaults Marcello who takes it in stride.

Episode 3a

3rd Day Sequence: Marcello meets Steiner, his distinguished intellectual friend, inside a church playing Bach on the organ. Steiner shows off his book of Sanskrit grammar.

Episode 4

4th Day Sequence: Late afternoon, Marcello, his photographer friend Paparazzo, and Emma drive to the outskirts of Rome to cover the story of the purported sighting of the Madonna by two children. Although the Catholic Church is officially skeptical, a huge crowd of devotees and reporters gathers at the site.

3rd Night Sequence: That night, the event is broadcast over Italian radio and television. Blindly following the two children from corner to corner in a downpour, the crowd tears a small tree apart for its branches and leaves said to have sheltered the Madonna. Meanwhile, Emma prays to the Virgin Mary to be given sole possession of Marcello's heart.

3rd Dawn Sequence: The gathering ends at dawn with the crowd mourning a sick child, a pilgrim brought by his mother to be healed, but trampled to death in the melee.

Episode 3b

4th Night Sequence: One evening, Marcello and Emma attend a gathering at Steiner’s luxurious home where they are introduced to a group of intellectuals who recite poetry, strum the guitar, offer philosophical ideas, and listen to sounds of nature recorded on tape. While one of the women declares it better not to get married so that one does not need to choose, Marcello responds that it is better to be chosen than to choose. Emma appears enchanted with Steiner's home and children, telling Marcello that one day he will have a home like Steiner's.

Outside on the terrace, Marcello confesses to Steiner his admiration for all he stands for, but Steiner admits he is torn between the security that a materialistic life affords and his longing for a more spiritual albeit insecure way of life. Steiner philosophizes about the need for love in the world and fears what his children may grow up to face one day.

Intermezzo

5th Day Sequence: Marcello spends the afternoon working on his novel at a seaside restaurant where he meets Paola, a young waitress from Perugia playing Perez Prado's cha-cha Patricia on the jukebox and then humming its tune. He asks her if she has a boyfriend, then describes her as an angel in Umbrian paintings.

Episode 5

5th Night Sequence: Marcello meets his father (Annibale Ninchi) visiting Rome on the Via Veneto. With Paparazzo, they go to the Cha-Cha-Cha Club where Marcello introduces his father to Fanny, a beautiful dancer and one of his past one-night stands (he had promised to get her picture in the paper, but failed to do it). Fanny takes a liking to his father. Marcello tells Paparazzo that as a child he had never seen much of his father, who would spend weeks away from home. Fanny invites Marcello’s father back to her flat, and two other dancers invite the two younger men to go with them.  Marcello leaves the others when they get to the dancers' neighborhood. Fanny comes out of her house, upset that Marcello's father has become ill.

4th Dawn Sequence: Marcello's father has suffered what seems to be a mild heart attack.  Marcello wants him to stay with him in Rome so they can get to know each other, but his father, weakened, wants to go home and gets in a taxi to catch the first train home.  He leaves Marcello forlorn, on the street, watching the taxi leave.

Episode 6

6th Night Sequence: Marcello, Nico, and other friends met on the Via Veneto are driven to a castle owned by aristocrats at Bassano di Sutri outside Rome. There is already a party long in progress, and the party-goers are bleary-eyed and intoxicated.  By chance, Marcello meets Maddalena again. The two of them explore a suite of ruins annexed to the castle. Maddalena seats Marcello in a vast room and then closets herself in another room connected by an echo chamber. As a disembodied voice, Maddalena asks him to marry her; Marcello professes his love for her, avoiding answering her proposal.  Another man kisses and embraces Maddalena, who loses interest in Marcello. He rejoins the group, and eventually spends the night with Jane, an American artist and heiress.

5th Dawn Sequence: Burnt out and bleary-eyed, the group returns at dawn to the main section of the castle, to be met by the matriarch of the castle, who is on her way to mass, accompanied by priests in a procession.

Episode 3c

7th Night Sequence: Marcello and Emma are alone in his sports car on an isolated road. Emma starts an argument by professing her love, and tries to get out of the car; Marcello pleads with her not to get out.  Emma says that Marcello will never find another woman who loves him the way she does. Marcello becomes enraged at her, telling her that he cannot live with her maternal and smothering love.  He now wants her to get out of the car, and she refuses.  With some violence (a bite from her and a slap from him), he throws her out of the car and drives off. She is left alone on a dark, lonely road, in the dark. After some hours (it is now dawn), Emma is still alone on the road, holding flowers, when she hears his car approaching. She gets into the car without saying a word.

6th Dawn Sequence: Marcello and Emma are asleep in bed, tenderly intertwined; Marcello receives a phone call. He rushes to the Steiners' apartment and learns that Steiner has killed himself and his two children.

6th Day Sequence: After waiting with the police for Steiner’s wife to return home, he meets her outside to break the terrible news while paparazzi swarm around her snapping pictures.

Episode 7

6th Night Sequence: An unspecified amount of time later, an older Marcello—now with gray in his hair—and a group of partygoers break into a Fregene beach house owned by Riccardo, a friend of Marcello's. To celebrate her recent divorce from Riccardo, Nadia performs a striptease to Perez Prado's cha-cha Patricia. The drunken Marcello attempts to provoke the other partygoers into an orgy. Due to their inebriated states, however, the party descends into mayhem with Marcello throwing pillow feathers around the room as he rides a young woman crawling on her hands and knees. Riccardo shows up at the house and angrily tells the partiers to leave.

Epilogue

7th Dawn Sequence: The party proceeds to the beach at dawn where they find a modern-day leviathan, a bloated, stingray-like creature, caught in the fishermen's nets. In his stupor, Marcello comments on how its eyes stare even in death.

7th Day Sequence: Paola, the adolescent waitress from the seaside restaurant in Fregene, calls to Marcello from across an estuary but the words they exchange are lost on the wind, drowned out by the crash of the waves. He signals his inability to understand what she is saying or interpret her gestures. He shrugs and returns to the partygoers; one of the women joins him and they hold hands as they walk away from the beach. In a long final close-up, Paola waves to Marcello then stands watching him with an enigmatic smile.

Cast

* Marcello Mastroianni as Marcello Rubini
* Anita Ekberg as Sylvia
* Anouk Aimée as Maddalena
* Yvonne Furneaux as Emma
* Lex Barker as Robert, Sylvia's fiancé.
* Magali Noël as Fanny

* Alain Cuny as Steiner
* Nadia Gray as Nadia
* Annibale Ninchi as Marcello's father
* Walter Santesso as Paparazzo
* Valeria Ciangottini as Paola
* Riccardo Garrone as Riccardo

* Ida Galli as Debutante of the Year
* Audrey McDonald as Jane
* Gloria Jones as Gloria
* Alain Dijon as Frankie Stout
* Enzo Cerusico as Newspaper photographer
* Nico as Nico

Production

Costumes

Critics have often commented on the extravagant costumes used throughout Fellini's films. In various interviews, Fellini claimed that the film's initial inspiration was the fashionable ladies' sack dress because of what the dress could hide beneath it.  Brunello Rondi, Fellini's co-screenwriter and long-time collaborator, confirmed this view explaining that "the fashion of women's sack dresses which possessed that sense of luxurious butterflying out around a body that might be physically beautiful but not morally so; these sack dresses struck Fellini because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside." 

Writing

Credit for the creation of Steiner, the intellectual who commits suicide after shooting his two children, goes to co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli. Having gone to school with Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, Pinelli had closely followed the writer's career and felt that his over-intellectualism had become emotionally sterile, leading to his suicide in a Turin hotel in 1950.  This idea of a "burnt-out existence" is carried over to Steiner in the party episode where the sounds of nature are not to be experienced first-hand by himself and his guests but in the virtual world of tape recordings.

Filming

Most of the film was shot at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Set designer Piero Gherardi created over eighty locations, including the Via Veneto, the dome of Saint Peter's with the staircase leading up to it, and various nightclubs.  However, other sequences were shot on location such as the party at the aristocrats' castle filmed in the real Bassano di Sutri palace north of Rome. (Some of the servants, waiters, and guests were played by real aristocrats.) Fellini combined constructed sets with location shots, depending on script requirements—a real location often "gave birth to the modified scene and, consequently, the newly constructed set."  The film's famous last scenes where the monster fish is pulled out of the sea and Marcello waves goodbye to Paola (the teenage "Umbrian angel") were shot on location at Passo Oscuro, a small resort town situated on the Italian coast 30 kilometers from Rome.

Fellini scrapped a major sequence that would have involved the relationship of Marcello with Dolores, an older writer living in a tower, to be played by 1930s Academy Award-winning actress Luise Rainer.  If the director’s dealings with Rainer "who used to involve Fellini in futile discussion" were problematic, biographer Kezich argues that while rewriting the screenplay, the Dolores character grew "hyperbolic" and Fellini decided to jettison "the entire story line." 

The famous scene in the Trevi Fountain was shot over a week in winter: in March according to the BBC,  in late January according to Anita Ekberg.  Fellini claimed that Ekberg stood in the cold water in her dress for hours without any trouble while Mastroianni had to wear a wetsuit beneath his clothes - to no avail. It was only after the actor "polished off a bottle of vodka" and "was completely pissed" that Fellini could shoot the scene. 

Paparazzo

The character of Paparazzo, the news photographer (Walter Santesso), was inspired by photojournalist Tazio Secchiaroli and is the origin of the word paparazzi used in many languages to describe intrusive photographers.  As to the origin of the character's name itself, Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella argues that although "it is indeed an Italian family name, the word is probably a corruption of the word papataceo, a large and bothersome mosquito. Ennio Flaiano, the film's co-screenwriter and creator of Paparazzo, reports that he took the name from a character in a novel by George Gissing."  Gissing's character, Signor Paparazzo, is found in his travel book, By the Ionian Sea (1901).

Themes, motifs and structure

Marcello is a journalist in Rome during the late 1950s who covers tabloid news of movie stars, religious visions and the self-indulgent aristocracy while searching for a more meaningful way of life. Precisely, Marcello faces the existential struggle of having to choose between two lifestyles, namely depicted by journalism and literature. Indeed, Marcello on the one hand leads a lifestyle of excess, of fame and pleasure amongst Rome's thriving popular culture. Thereby, depicting the confusion and frequency with which Marcello gets distracted by women and power. On the other, a more sensitive Marcello aspires of becoming a writer, of leading an intellectual's life amongst the elites, the poets, writers and philosophers of the time. In the end, Marcello chooses neither journalism, nor literature. Thematically however, he's opted for the life of excess and popularity by officially becoming a publicity agent.

The film's theme "is predominantly café society, the diverse and glittery world rebuilt upon the ruins and poverty" of the Italian postwar period. In the opening sequence, a plaster statue of Christ the Labourer suspended by cables from a helicopter, flies past the ruins of an ancient Roman aqueduct. The statue is being taken to the Pope at the Vatican. Journalist Marcello and a photographer named Paparazzo follow in a second helicopter. The symbolism of Christ, arms outstretched as if blessing all of Rome as it flies overhead, is soon replaced by the profane lifestyle and neo-modern architecture of the "new" Rome, founded on the economic miracle of the late 1950s. (Much of this was filmed in Cinecittà or in EUR, the Mussolini-style area south of Rome.) The delivery of the statue is the first of many recurring scenes, placing religious icons in the midst of characters demonstrating their "modern" morality, influenced by the booming economy and the emerging mass-consumer lifestyle.

Seven principal episodes

The most common interpretation of the film is a mosaic, its parts linked by the protagonist, Marcello Rubini, a journalist.  The seven principal episodes are as follows:

1. Marcello's evening with the heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimée)

2. His long, frustrating night with the American actress Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) that ends in the Trevi fountain at dawn

3. His reunion with the intellectual Steiner (Alain Cuny); their relationship is divided into three sequences spread over the entire film: a) the encounter, b) Steiner's party, and c) Steiner's tragedy

4. The fake miracle

5. His father's visit/Steiner's Party

6. The aristocrat's party/Steiner's tragedy
   
7. The "orgy"  at the beach house

Interrupting these seven episodes is the restaurant sequence with the angelic Paola; they are framed by a prologue (Christ statue over Rome) and epilogue (the monster fish), giving the film its innovative and symmetrically symbolic structure. The evocations are: seven deadly sins, seven sacraments, seven virtues, seven days of creation.

Other critics claim that this widespread view of the film's structure is inaccurate. Peter Bondanella, for example, argues that "any critic of La dolce vita not mesmerized by the magic number seven will find it almost impossible to organize the numerous sequences on a strictly numerological basis." 

An aesthetic of disparity

Critic Robert Richardson suggests that the originality of La dolce vita lies in a new form of film narrative that mines "an aesthetic of disparity."  Abandoning traditional plot and conventional "character development," Fellini and co-screenwriters Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, forged a cinematic narrative that rejected continuity, unnecessary explanations, and narrative logic in favour of seven non-linear encounters between Marcello, a kind of Dantesque Pilgrim, and an underworld of 120 different characters. These encounters build up a cumulative impression on the viewer that finds resolution in an "overpowering sense of the disparity between what life has been or could be, and what it actually is." 

In a device used earlier in his films, Fellini orders the disparate succession of sequences as movements from evening to dawn. Also employed as an ordering device is the image of a downward spiral that Marcello sets in motion when descending the first of several staircases (including ladders) that open and close each major episode. The upshot is that the film's aesthetic form, rather than its content, embodies the overall theme of Rome as a moral wasteland.

Critical reception

Writing for L'Espresso, Italian novelist Alberto Moravia highlighted the film's variations in tone: "Highly expressive throughout, Fellini seems to change the tone according to the subject matter of each episode, ranging from expressionist caricature to pure neo-realism. In general, the tendency to caricature is greater the more severe the film's moral judgement although this is never totally contemptuous, there being always a touch of complacence and participation, as in the final orgy scene or the episode at the aristocrats' castle outside Rome, the latter being particularly effective for its descriptive acuteness and narrative rhythm." 

In Filmcritica XI, Italian poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini argued that "La dolce vita was too important to be discussed as one would normally discuss a film. Though not as great as Chaplin, Eisenstein or Mizoguchi, Fellini is unquestionably an author rather than a director. The film is therefore his and his alone... The camera moves and fixes the image in such a way as to create a sort of diaphragm around each object, thus making the object’s relationship to the world appear as irrational and magical. As each new episode begins, the camera is already in motion using complicated movements. Frequently, however, these sinuous movements are brutally punctuated by a very simple documentary shot, like a quotation written in everyday language". 

In France, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, film critic and co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma, felt that "what La dolce vita lacks is the structure of a masterpiece. In fact, the film has no proper structure: it is a succession of cinematic moments, some more convincing than others… In the face of criticism, La Dolce Vita disintegrates, leaving behind little more than a sequence of events with no common denominator linking them into a meaningful whole". 

The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther praised Fellini’s “brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay and, eventually, a withering commentary on the tragedy of the over-civilized… Fellini is nothing if not fertile, fierce and urbane in calculating the social scene around him and packing it onto the screen. He has an uncanny eye for finding the offbeat and grotesque incident, the gross and bizarre occurrence that exposes a glaring irony. He has, too, a splendid sense of balance and a deliciously sardonic wit that not only guided his cameras but also affected the writing of the script. In sum, it is an awesome picture, licentious in content but moral and vastly sophisticated in its attitude and what it says". 

Film critic Roger Ebert considered La Dolce Vita as Fellini’s best film, as well as his favorite film of all time besides Citizen Kane (1941),  and listed it consistently in his top ten films for the Sight & Sound Greatest Films poll every ten years.   Ebert's first review for the film, written on October 4, 1961, was the first film review he wrote, before he started his career as a film critic in 1967.  The film was also a personal touchstone for Ebert, in how his perspective of the movie and his life changes as time passes by, giving this summation in his 1997 Great Movie review:

"Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw 'La Dolce Vita' in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom 'the sweet life' represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello's world; Chicago's North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello's age. When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal." 

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that from 57 reviews, 96% were positive; the consensus states: "An epic, breathtakingly stylish cinematic landmark, La Dolce Vita remains riveting in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- its sprawling length."  On Metacritic, the film has a 93/100 rating based on 12 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". 

The film earned $6 million in North American rentals on original release.  The film was re-released in North America in 1966 and earned $1.5 million in rentals. 

Censorship

Perceived by the Catholic Church as a parody of the second coming of Jesus, the opening scene and the film as a whole were condemned by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in 1960.  Subject to widespread censorship, the film was banned in Spain, until the death of Franco in 1975. Umberto Tupini, the Minister of Culture of the Tambroni government censored it and other "shameful films".

Awards and recognition

The New York Times hailed La dolce vita as "one of the most widely seen and acclaimed European movies of the 1960s".  It was nominated for four Academy Awards, and won one for Best Costume Design: Black-and-White. La dolce vita also earned the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.  Entertainment Weekly voted it the 6th Greatest film of all time. 

In 2010, the film was ranked #11 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema". 

In popular culture

As mentioned above, one of the characters (Paparazzo) is the inspiration for the popular term "paparazzi," a word for an intrusive photojournalist.

Tributes to Fellini in the "Director's Cut" of Cinema Paradiso (1988) include a helicopter suspending a statue of Christ over the city and scenes in which the Trevi Fountain is used as a backdrop while Toto, the main character, grows up to be a famous film director.

Woody Allen's Celebrity (1998) is a New York-set re-working of La dolce vita with Kenneth Branagh taking up Mastroianni's role, and Winona Ryder and Charlize Theron taking on the roles held by Anouk Aimée and Anita Ekberg, respectively.

In Sofia Coppola's film Lost in Translation (2003), Kelly's interview for LIT resembles Sylvia's interview scenes in La dolce vita. Charlotte and Bob later meet in the middle of the night and watch the famous Trevi Fountain sequence while drinking sake.  Coppola said, "I saw that movie on TV when I was in Japan. It's not plot-driven, it's about them wandering around. And there was something with the Japanese subtitles and them speaking Italian - it had a truly enchanting quality".

The 2013 Italian film The Great Beauty features a former writer who wanders through the parties of the Roman high society trying to decide what to do with his life.
  

Notes

La Dolce Vita (1960) - IMDb
IMDb
17 January 2017 4:34 PM, UTC
NEWS
There was an error trying to load your rating for this title.
Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later.
X Beta I'm Watching This!
Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends.
Error
La dolce vita (original title)
Not Rated |
A series of stories following a week in the life of a philandering paparazzo journalist living in Rome.
Director:
a list of 32 titles
created 12 Jun 2013
a list of 49 titles
created 02 Jul 2013
a list of 46 titles
created 06 Jun 2014
a list of 38 titles
created 22 Jul 2014
a list of 28 titles
created 11 months ago
Title: La Dolce Vita (1960)
8.1/10
Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.
You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin.
Won         1         Oscar. Another       10 wins & 12 nominations. See more awards  »
Videos
A harried movie director retreats into his memories and fantasies.
Director: Federico Fellini
A care-free girl is sold to a traveling entertainer, consequently enduring physical and emotional pain along the way.
Director: Federico Fellini
A series of comedic and nostalgic vignettes set in a 1930s Italian coastal town.
Director: Federico Fellini
A waifish prostitute wanders the streets of Rome looking for true love but finds only heartbreak.
Director: Federico Fellini
A character study of five young men at crucial turning points in their lives in a small town in Italy.
Director: Federico Fellini
A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he reunites with a hip American journalism student and attempts to persuade her to run away with him to Italy.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
After living a life marked by coldness, an aging professor is forced to confront the emptiness of his existence.
Director: Ingmar Bergman
A woman disappears during a Mediterranean boating trip. During the search, her lover and her best friend become attracted to each other.
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
A series of disjointed mythical tales set in first century Rome.
Director: Federico Fellini
A day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their steadily deteriorating relationship.
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
A fluid, unconnected and sometimes chaotic procession of scenes detailing the various people and events of life in Italy's capital.
Director: Federico Fellini
A mod London photographer finds something very suspicious in the shots he has taken of a mysterious beauty in a desolate park.
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Edit
Storyline
Journalist and man-about-town Marcello struggles to find his place in the world, torn between the allure of Rome's elite social scene and the stifling domesticity offered by his girlfriend, all the while searching for a way to become a serious writer. Written by Jeff Lewis
The Sweet Life See more  »
Genres:
19 April 1961 (USA) See more  »
Also Known As:
La Dolce Vita See more  »
Filming Locations:
Federico Fellini considered Burt Lancaster for the role of Marcello Rubini. See more »
Goofs
During the "Madonna" scene at about 1:04, the amount of tape on the reels of the recorder changes between the wide shots and the close-ups. See more »
Quotes
Referenced in Live!  (2007) See more »
Soundtracks
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565
(uncredited)
Written by Johann Sebastian Bach (as J.S. Bach)
Performed by Alain Cuny
(Biloxi, Mississippi) – See all my reviews
LA DOLCE VITA presents a series of incidents in the life of Roman tabloid reporter Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni)--and although each incident is very different in content they create a portrait of an intelligent but superficial man who is gradually consumed by "the sweet life" of wealth, celebrity, and self-indulgence he reports on and which he has come to crave.
Although the film seems to be making a negative statement about self-indulgence that leads to self-loathing, Fellini also gives the viewer plenty of room to act as interpreter, and he cleverly plays one theme against its antithesis throughout the film. (The suffocation of monogamy vs. the meaninglessness of promiscuity and sincere religious belief vs. manipulative hypocrisy are but two of the most obvious juxtapositions.) But Fellini's most remarkable effect here is his ability to keep us interested in the largely unsympathetic characters LA DOLCE VITA presents: a few are naive to the point of stupidity; most are vapid; the majority (including the leads) are unspeakably shallow--and yet they still hold our interest over the course of this three hour film.
The cast is superior, with Marcello Mastroianni's personal charm particularly powerful. As usual with Fellini, there is a lot to look at on the screen: although he hasn't dropped into the wild surrealism for which he was sometimes known, there are quite a few surrealistic flourishes and visual ironies aplenty--the latter most often supplied by the hordes of photographers that scuttle after the leading characters much like cockroaches in search of crumbs. For many years available to the home market in pan-and-scan only, the film is now in a letterbox release that makes it all the more effective. Strongly recommended.
Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer
69 of 87 people found this review helpful.  Was this review helpful to you?
Yes

‎La Dolce Vita (1960) directed by Federico Fellini • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd
6
Slight spoilers in the last paragraph.
Our modern malaise is all-encompassing self-pity. I went through it last year: what was the point of wanting things if you were never going to get them anyway? In the throes of my self-absorbed sorrow, I didn’t notice that I had no ambition to begin with. Finding something to care about got me out of that horrible dark place, but every day, I come across more people my age – kids who haven’t even hit twenty yet, for fuck’s sake – diagnosed with depression, although nothing monumental has happened to them, to us. Why are you so unhappy? I don’t know.
Watching La Dolce Vita was like coming across yet another one of those…
9
"Don't be like me. Salvation doesn't lie within four walls. I'm too serious to be a dilettante and too much a dabbler to be a professional. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected."
It's always intimidating to try and write about something considered to be one of the best films ever made. Regardless of how great it might be, it can be hard to have fun without a personal access point. It's like staring at the Mona Lisa: sure it's an amazing painting and it's easy to appreciate on that level, but what does it have to say about my own subjective reality?
So it was…
8
Truthful, audacious, bold, boring in stretches, and passionately sweeping: Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita is a film that I admire greatly, but I never truly found a direct connection to it in relation to my own personal experiences. I was very indifferent to much of the film in the second half, only to have spurts of majestic beauty and honesty awake me from my slowly-fading attention. The ending is absolutely perfect however, and just like Don't Look Now, It's a conclusion that raised my thoughts of the film as a whole. I don't think it comes close to the masterful beauty of 8 1/2, but I can clearly understand why it is as revered as it is. Marcello Mastroianni stuns…
17
After adoring Nights of Cabiria, and loving 8 ½ , it seemed like the appropriate time to take another dip into Fellini’s pool with a film that many consider their favourite.
I had no foreknowledge going in that this is what influenced The Great Beauty, a film I detested so much that I walked out after about 15 minutes ( actually walked out twice, first after 10 minutes, and then, after deciding to give it another try and continued, walked out again after another 5 ).
I was positively giddy watching the opening scene of ‘Flying Jesus’, there was a big smirk across my face. It wasn’t just the symbolic imagery, but also the wonderfully creative cinematography. Of course seeing…
7
Helicopters carry a giant jesus statue with his arms outstretched over the skies of rome, the children follow and scream and cry with glee at the mere spectacle of it all, much like the paps that ride along inside one of the copters. The beautiful girls sunbathing atop an apartment building wave their hats at them enthusiastically and they quickly swivel around for a chance at their phone numbers. Marcello oozes cool, a distinguished "naughty boy" whose duty is to inform the public, so he maintains. Seven days but mostly nights are presented tumultuously through the lens of Marcello, the lost and happy and damned and unhappy paparazzi constantly on the move towards something, in search of something. "Every night…
Review by MajorMajor22 ★★★★★
All of the things and more. Watch it once. Watch it twice. You'll either feel it or you won't. If you don't, wait a few years. Life will happen. You'll watch it again and you'll understand. True art is always there waiting for you when you're ready for it.
This hit me instantly. It was one of those films that 'changed everything'. Doors opened to worlds I didn't even know existed and once I walked through them I couldn't ever go back. I think everyone has a few experiences with art like that in their life if they're lucky. I thought I knew what a movie was but after watching this I realized that I knew nothing. I had to…
Review by Dinelka Balasuriya ★★½
50/100
I must now attempt to make sense of the events that have transpired during my viewing of La Dolce Vita.
Here’s something of a statistic that conveys the great challenge I faced watching this movie in its entirety:
First hour watched in one sitting
Next two hours watched over a period of 7 hours
I cannot for the life of me remember the last time I had an experience like La Dolce Vita. The first hour was glamorous, exuberant, chaotic and alluring. The subsequent two hours were a great bore.
One example that highlights the issue I have with the second half is the scene at Steiner’s place with his highly intellectual friends. For a long scene dominated entirely…
Review by Carter Moon ★★★★
I've never seen a more challenging, provocative, mind-bending film. To me, this is so much more important than 8 1/2, so much more perplexing and enriching. A film I will want revisit again and again throughout my lifetime, and which I will no doubt draw something different from with each viewing.
Italian people, an unfaithful journalist, a fake miracle, a tragedy, a messed up and yet unconcluded orgy, a weird dead-like stingray and totally unconnected stories.
Also gave meaning to the word paparazzo.
Review by Martin White ★★★½
Set in late 1950s Roma, a beautifully shot film that much like Roman Holiday makes you want to visit Rome in that era. It is in an episodic form, which makes picking out the common threads a little harder. What I took from it was seeing the elite juxtoposed with the poor (particularly the scenes involving the alleged religious miracle seen by some children on the outskirts of Rome). I think I would need to spend some time on it and know more about Italy then to really get it, but others will enjoy this a lot more than me I'm sure.
Review by Chris Purdie ★★★★★
Seen this a few times now. I used to struggle with it but I'm starting to get into the flow of Fellini's style. It's frustrating because while I love individual parts his films, as a collective whole I just struggle with length of them. When I put this on last night I actually forgot that it was nearly 3 hours long but it was mostly a pleasure to sit through this time. While the length was still an issue, the indivual episode's all entertained and Marcello's arc resonated stronger than it ever did before. Put simply, I have been this character far too many times and it's likely I'll resemble him again.......
At times enthralling, at others depressing; there is a stinging, confessional truthfullness to the way Fellini captures Marcello's aimless ambition and that's what makes La Dolce Vita such a masterpiece.

Super Reviewer
½
Essential surrealist film, La Dolce Vita is an early critique to press photography, bourgeois society, special attention to stars and social decadence.
Lucas Martins
Super Reviewer
½
This doesn't happen very often, but I must say, I'm rather baffled. I'm not sure how I truly feel about this movie. I don't know if I truly get it. I'm a smart guy, and I'd like to think I can 'get' artsy European cinema, but I am simultaneously aware of why this is called a classic but also baffled as to why it is so adored.   The film tells the story of a tabloid photographer in Rome in the 50s who discovers that the high society world isn't all that it seems, that trying to find a balance betwween the relics of the past and the ever-growing ways of the modern world is complicated, and that it can be quite a challenge to discover who one really is amidst all of this. That's pretty much it. That's the plot in it's most simplified way.   It doesn't take long to really get all of this, but the film is just under three hours. I really don't think it needed to be. However,the film is wall to wall with style and cinematic craft. The film has a neat structure (it takes place over the course of about a weeks worth of days and nights, though not consecutively), and there's all kinds of religious imagery and symbolism-allowing the viewer to either just read into it like there's no tomorrow, or just take it at face value. Normally I'm cool with this sort of thing, but again, the movie is just about 3 hours...and kinda slow at times.   The film could have had far more substance, especially given the theme and premise, but the slice of life stuff it quite nice too. It just all happens to ramble far too often. Maybe I'm being too hard on this though. Maybe I should have been really exhauted and had my mind on other things when I sat down to watch it. Or maybe (and I'm probably in the minority here) Fellini was more full of crap than people might like to admit. I loved 8 1/2 , but I was in a different mood and mindset when I saw that.   I do love the music and cinematography though. There's some really gorgeous (and sometiems surreal) images, and some sequences are just fantastic, but it's all just kinda hard to endure in one setting. Ther performances aren't bad, but it seems like Fellini was more interested in just letting everything just run wild instead of having a far tighter hold on things. Maybe the issues Im haivng with this can be attributed to the fact that, as a bunch of critics and scholars have said, this was a transitional film for Fellini between his neo-realistic stuff, and his whimsical art film. It has elements of both, and they are done well, but maybe they just don't blend all that wonderfully.   I'm rambling, much lke the movie. I didn't hate it, but I found it very hard to endure. Is it a really good movie? Yeah. Is it really all that influential? Sure. Does it deserve all the accolades and respect it gets? To an extent. You should see this, just to say you finally saw it, because it is worth it. As a cohesive masterpiece though, I didn't find it to be that exactly. 4 stars for the film overall, and an extra half star just for the style and technique.
Chris Weber

Rewind Film: 'La Dolce Vita, directed by Federico Fellini | South China Morning Post
South China Morning Post
Rewind Film: 'La Dolce Vita, directed by Federico Fellini
 
Rewind Film: 'La Dolce Vita, directed by Federico Fellini
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 02 June, 2013, 12:00am
UPDATED : Sunday, 02 June, 2013, 5:33pm
Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee
Director: Federico Fellini
Americans might harp on about freedom and the French have their je ne sais quoi, but few people take greater pride in their insatiable lust for life than the Italians. The Roman Empire came and went and the Renaissance died out, but Italy saw a smaller resurgence during the heady days of the swinging sixties.
Conflict often leads to great art, and after the end of the second world war, Italian filmmakers became obsessed with depicting poverty and depression in what they deemed "neo-realism". Federico Fellini was one, but all that changed when the director offered up his three-hour epic on pure hedonistic pleasure: La Dolce Vita.
The film has a simplistic, almost haphazard structure, set roughly over seven days in the life of gossip columnist Marcello. He's a handsome but tired man, longing for literary greatness, but often stuck in a series of decadent nights and regretful dawns, covering what the public deems as "the sweet life": movie stars, playboys and people famous for being famous.
Through haughty intellectuals, wild Hollywood starlets and sex-obsessed aristocrats, Fellini is saying something about this "sweet" way of life, but what exactly? More than 50 years after it put Italy on the international film map, La Dolce Vita is still being debated.
Is it a depiction of Fellini's own self-indulgent lifestyle? A balanced look at sin and salvation? A Christian nightmare of what's wrong with society? Or a parody of celebrity culture and post-war excess?
That brilliant opening aerial shot of the Eternal City, contrasted by speedy rides through the streets on the back of a Vespa. A late-night splash in the Trevi Fountain (above), and the early morning fishermen surprised by their morning catch.
The next time you're in Rome, wondering why the shops close for hours in the middle of the day, waiting for a bus that never meets its schedule or dodging fake gladiators desperate for five euros, do like Marcello. Stop worrying about meaning, order a caffe and take in the sweet life the way the Italians do.

La Dolce Vita Movie Review & Film Summary (1960) | Roger Ebert
Tweet
I have heard theories that Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" catalogs the seven deadly sins, takes place on the seven hills of Rome, and involves seven nights and seven dawns, but I have never looked into them, because that would reduce the movie to a crossword puzzle. I prefer it as an allegory, a cautionary tale of a man without a center.
Advertisement
Fellini shot the movie in 1959 on the Via Veneto, the Roman street of nightclubs, sidewalk cafes and the parade of the night. His hero is a gossip columnist, Marcello, who chronicles "the sweet life" of fading aristocrats, second-rate movie stars, aging playboys and women of commerce. The role was played by Marcello Mastroianni , and now that his life has ended we can see that it was his most representative. The two Marcellos -- character and actor -- flowed together into a handsome, weary, desperate man, who dreams of someday doing something good, but is trapped in a life of empty nights and lonely dawns.
The movie leaps from one visual extravaganza to another, following Marcello as he chases down stories and women. He has a suicidal fiancee ( Magali Noel ) at home. In a nightclub, he picks up a promiscuous society beauty ( Anouk Aimee ), and together they visit the basement lair of a prostitute. The episode ends not in decadence but in sleep; we can never be sure that Marcello has had sex with anyone.
Another dawn. And we begin to understand the film's structure: A series of nights and dawns, descents and ascents. Marcello goes down into subterranean nightclubs, hospital parking lots, the hooker's hovel and an ancient crypt. And he ascends St. Peter's dome, climbs to a choir loft, and to the high-rise apartment of Steiner ( Alain Cuny ), the intellectual who is his hero. He will even fly over Rome.
Advertisement
The famous opening scene, as a statue of Christ is carried above Rome by a helicopter, is matched with the close, in which fisherman on the beach find a sea monster in their nets. Two Christ symbols: the statue "beautiful" but false, the fish "ugly" but real. During both scenes there are failures of communication. The helicopter circles as Marcello tries to get the phone numbers of three sunbathing beauties. At the end, across a beach, he sees the shy girl he met one day when he went to the country in search of peace to write his novel. She makes typing motions to remind him, but he does not remember, shrugs, and turns away.
If the opening and closing scenes are symmetrical, so are many others, matching the sacred and profane and casting doubts on both. An early sequence finds Marcello covering the arrival in Rome of an improbably buxom movie star ( Anita Ekberg ), and consumed with desire. He follows her to the top of St. Peters, into the bowels of a nightclub, and into the Roman night, where wild dogs howl and she howls back. His pursuit ends at dawn when she wades into the Trevi Fountain and he wades after her, idealizing her into all women, into The Woman; she remains forever just out of reach.
This sequence can be paired with a later one where children report a vision of the Virgin. Marcello races to the site, which is surrounded by TV cameras and a crowd of the devout. Again, we have an idealized woman and the hope that she can solve every problem. But the children lead the faithful on a chase, just as the Ekberg led Marcello around Rome. They see the Virgin here, and then there, as the lame and the blind hobble after them and their grandfather cadges for tips. Once again everything collapses in an exhausted dawn.
Advertisement
The central episodes in "La Dolce Vita" involve Steiner, who represents all that Marcello envies. Steiner lives in an apartment filled with art. He presides over a salon of poets, folk singers, intellectuals. He has a beautiful wife and two perfect children. When Marcello sees him entering a church, they ascend to the organ loft and Steiner plays Bach while urging Marcello to have more faith in himself, and finish that book. Then follows the night of Steiner's party, and the moment (more or less the exact center of the film) where Marcello takes his typewriter to a country trattoria and tries to write. Then comes the terrible second Steiner scene, when Marcello discovers that Steiner's serenity was made from a tissue of lies.
To mention these scenes is to be reminded of how many other great moments this rich film contains. The echo chamber. The Mass at dawn. The final desperate orgy. And of course the touching sequence with Marcello's father ( Annibale Ninchi ), a traveling salesman who joins Marcello on a tour of the night. In a club they see a sad-faced clown (Poidor) lead a lonely balloon out of the room with his trumpet. And Marcello's father, filled with the courage of champagne, grows bold with a young woman who owes Marcello a favor -- only to fall ill and leave, gray and ashen, again at dawn.
The movie is made with boundless energy. Fellini stood here at the dividing point between the neorealism of his earlier films (like " La Strada ") and the carnival visuals of his extravagant later ones (" Juliet of the Spirits ," " Amarcord "). His autobiographical " 8 1/2 ," made three years after "La Dolce Vita," is a companion-piece, but more knowing: There the hero is already a filmmaker, but here he is a young newspaperman on the make.
Advertisement
The music by Nino Rota is of a perfect piece with the material. It is sometimes quasi-liturgical, sometimes jazz, sometimes rock; lurking beneath is the irreverence of tuba and accordions, and snatches of pop songs ("Stormy Weather" and even "Jingle Bells"). The characters are forever in motion, and Rota gives them music for their processions and parades.
The casting is all typecasting. Anita Ekberg might not have been much of an actress, but she was the only person who could play herself. Lex Barker , a onetime movie Tarzan, was droll as her alcoholic boyfriend. Alain Cuny's severe self-confidence as Steiner is convincing, which is why his end is a shock. And remember Anouk Aimee, her dark glasses concealing a black eye; the practical, commonsensical Adriana Moneta as the streetwalker; Alan Dijon as the satanic ringleader at the nightclub; and always Mastroianni, his eyes squinting against a headache or a deeper ache of the soul. He was always a passive actor, and here that quality is needed: Seeking happiness but unable to take the steps to find it, he spends his nights in endless aimless searching, trying to please everyone, the juggler with more balls than skills.
Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw "La Dolce Vita" in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom "the sweet life" represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello's world; Chicago's North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello's age.
Advertisement
When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal. There may be no such thing as the sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself.
Popular Blog Posts

La Dolce Vita (1960)
Federico Fellini considered Enrico Maria Salerno for the role of Steiner. See more  »
Goofs:
Continuity: When Marcello is typewriting in a restaurant on the beach and talking to the blonde young girl, the bar of the typewriter is centered on the machine. In the next take, it is displaced to the left of the typewriter. See more  »
Quotes:
Steiner :Don't be like me. Salvation doesn't lie within four walls. I'm too serious to be a dilettante and too much a dabbler to be a professional. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected. See more  »
Movie Connections:
Author: shoolaroon
from usa
I first saw this movie probably over 25 years ago when I was quite a bit younger.  At that point I enjoyed it for its party scenes, sense of joy and life and vitality and....Marcello Mastroianni.  Now that I'm older myself and have just recently seen the movie again, I find that I have a much deeper understanding of it.  Maybe it takes some age to find some meaning. In a nutshell, Marcello is at a crossroads in his life, he's unable to settle down or move foreward into any direction - he's a diletante with aspirations but no real goals.  He's wrapped up in himself and in projecting rather dreamy ideals onto other people.  But as he keeps projecting on to others he comes to find in each situation that he doesn't really know the person and they are a mystery and probably a disappointment to him. certainly steiner is the biggest disappointment and disillusions him to a degree that he is apparently lost to a life of corruption and decadence as a result.  but it's not that these people are difficult to understand to someone other than marcello - i think we can see that anita ekberg's character really is just a big good-natured blond and not the mysterious goddess marcello makes her out to be; his father is again - the typical traveling salesman and perhaps not the paternal figure that marcello would like him to be. his amour maddelena lives up to her name even as marcello starts believing himself in love with her - he's literally seduced by nothing more than an image he creates in his own mind. his friend steiner seems to have it all to marcello and to be the renaissance man that he would like to be - but, of course, he is dissatisfied and disturbed and we see what the end is.  the only one whom marcello forms a somewhat realistic connection with is his girlfriend whom he treats badly and neglects despite her obvious love for him.  he refuses to actually work on the one relationship that he could actually succeed at - he would rather dream about possibilities than actualize something.
marcello cannot communicate with others because he cannot see them as the people they really are - he just sees them as projections of his own needs, aspirations, desires and goals.  when he finds out what they're really like, he either turns away or falls apart. this is an outstanding movie - 10 out of 10 and beautifully photographed.  if you don't get it now, try again in 10 years - it will wait for you to catch up.
Was the above review useful to you?

Movie Review -    - Fellini Film Lives Up to Foreign Hurrahs - NYTimes.com
Fellini Film Lives Up to Foreign Hurrahs
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: April     20, 1961
FEDERICO FELLINI'S "La Dolce Vita" ("The Sweet Life"), which has been a tremendous hit abroad since its initial presentation in Rome early last year, finally got to its American premiŌre at Henry Miller's Theatre last night and proved to deserve all the hurrahs and the impressive honors it has received.
For this sensational representation of certain aspects of life in contemporary Rome, as revealed in the clamorous experience of a free-wheeling newspaper man, is a brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay and, eventually, a withering commentary upon the tragedy of the over-civilized.
The critic is faced with a dilemma in attempting to assess and convey all the weird observations and intimations that abound in this titanic film. For Signor Fellini is nothing if not fertile, fierce and urbane in calculating the social scene around him and packing it onto the screen.
He has an uncanny eye for finding the offbeat and grotesque incident, the gross and bizarre occurrence that exposes a glaring irony. He has, too, a splendid sense of balance and a deliciously sardonic wit that not only guided his cameras but also affected the writing of his script. As a consequence there are scores of piercing ideas that pop out in the picture's nigh three hours and leave one shocked, amused, revolted and possibly stunned and bewildered at the end.
Perhaps the best way to give the reader a hint as to the flavor of this work is to describe its amazing beginning. A helicopter is seen flying toward Rome with an uncertain object dangling beneath it by a rope. As the machine comes closer, we see the object is a statue of Jesus, arms outstretched as if in blessing, a sweet, sad expression on its face.
Casually, the whirring "chopper" flies past an ancient aqueduct, the modern machine and its strange burden looking incongruous against the ruin. On it goes past piles of buildings, the ugly post-war apartment houses on the fringe of Rome and over the heads of a bevy of voluptuous females sunbathing in Bikinis on a penthouse roof. Then alongside it comes a second helicopter bearing our young newspaper man and his persistent photographer recording the bizarre scene.
Here is the flavor of the picture and, in a fast glimpse, its theme. Dignity is transmuted into the sensational. Old values, old disciplines are discarded for the modern, the synthetic, the quick by a society that is past sophistication and is sated with pleasure and itself. All of its straining for sensations is exploited for the picture magazines and the scandal sheets that merchandise excitement and vicarious thrills for the mob.
This is Signor Fellini's comment, not put into words, of course, but fully illuminated in his accumulation of startling episodes. It is clear in the crazy experience of his questing newspaper man (played brilliantly by Marcello Mastroianni) with a visiting Hollywood movie star (enacted by Anita Ekberg with surprising personality and punch.)
It comes through with devastating impact in an episode wherein two frightened kids are used to whip up a religious rally for the benefit of television. It is implicit in the contact of the hero with a strange and motley mob of jaded aristocrats and worldlings at an all-night party in a palace outside Rome.
It finally comes home to the hero (at least we think it does) when he sees his own pack of voracious photographers trying to make a sensation of the suicide of his most respected friend (Alain Cuny) for whom the "sweet life" becomes too grim. And it is evident in unmistakable symbols at a mammoth orgy the hero attends with a gang of depraved sensation seekers who face their loneliness and emptiness in the dawn.
Possibly Signor Fellini has rambled a bit in his film. Possibly he has strained logic and exaggerated somewhat here and there. (He has a character say "The public demands exaggeration," which does support the theme.)
In sum, it is an awesome picture, licentious in content but moral and vastly sophisticated in its attitude and what it says. An excellent cast performs it. In addition to those named above, Yvonne Furneaux as the hero's mistress, Anouk Aimee as a nymphomaniac, Annibale Ninchi as the hero's father and Magali Noel as a night-club chorus girl make most vivid impressions in a stupendous cast.
An all-purpose musical melody, as persistent and haunting as the memorable "Third Man" theme, is aptly played in the right places. The use of multilingual dialogue (the French and Italian translated with English subtitles) makes the yakkity-yak really sound like Rome. If the subtitles are insufficient, the picture itself speaks louder than any words.
The Cast
LA DOLCE VITA, scenario by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli. Ennio Flaiano and Brunello Rondi; directed by Signor Fellini; produced by Giuseppe Amato; presented here by Astor Films. At Henry Miller's Theatre, Forty-third Street east of Broadway. Running time: 175 minutes.
Marcello Rubino . . . . . Marcello Mastroianni

usman khawaja
Featured
October 27th, 2009 1:52 amRating:      AN WISTFUL AND WISE ITALIAN CAPRICE IN CANDOUR  Fellini chooses sixties Rome to deliver an incisively hedonistic satire on modern contemporary european culture where degeneracy is fashionable and egomania out rules morality ,it becomes even more powerful as art and A SOCIAL statement when applied to the capital city of a religion that has itself become mostly a caprice , as the opening shot demonstrates in a mockery with two helicopters conveying a plaster statue of christ, being transported over the eclectic mix of ancient and ugly modern architectural design of Rome itself while semi -naked women sunbath on top of skyscrapers .  The main prodigal protagonist involved in this exorcism to retrieve some sense is marcello ,a journalist who leads a vacuous superficial life covering the modern day news coverage as a gossip columnist and converging the freak circus that news media has become itself .  He is belligerently intelligent and realises his redundant role in this lunatic milieu but as the rest of humanity he goes with the flow and the movie encompasses seven days in his frantic but uneventful life which is packed with events and disasters that will be ignored by him for the trivia that he exaggerates to sell his news media and that also echoes the indifference of humanity in general to anything of crucial importance while superficial instant trivia are celebrated in a gala cause .  The women in his life are almost marionettes to him as they serve the purpose of a convenience as sexual objects ,ranging from his frustrated mistress who attempts suicide in a desperate gesture to his indifference and the rather sybaritic socialite heiress he attaches himself to played by Anouk aimee ,who takes him on his wild adventures in her posh sports car .  The main event is his coverage of the arrival of a celebrity american actress visiting Roma played by Anita Ekberg who is the object of his desire and fascination like a sex toy while he interviews her and they mutually abuse and lusciously exploit each other in a degenerate manner , ultimately ending tragically in an icon of frustrated romance in the lush Trevi fountain .  The epic satire is set in spectacular nightclubs ,with gala revues and musical cabarets and aristocratic italian castles where the superficial rich parade in their extravaganza in degenerate profligacy indulging every selfish whim.  But it balances the act with showing the realistic squalor in inner Rome and the exploitation of the vulnerable who survive in despair on the fringes of this extroverted existence .  Marcello is chasing a quest for happiness and love which is impossible to achieve even in an impossible dream like the symbolic sequence portrayed between him and Ekberg in the Trevi fountain which is the epitome of romantic travesty .  Yet the final orgy in a beach house following the sensually intricate yet intellectually provoking ARISTOCRATIC party in a suburban Roman castle shows the reality of a degenerate culture in the most profound cynicism to be ever witnessed in cinema .  The recurrent enchanting musical encores and the Balenciaga wardrobe just goes to provide the metaphorical sallow glamour and beauty which the pallid human spirit has lost in the centre of the great european civilisation and the absolute doom is demonstrated in a horrific sub-plot which covers the tragic, yet perfect life of a rich intellectual played by alan cluny ,who serves fellini as a metaphor for the ultimate fate of a festering and decaying civilisation .  The events are abjure and alternately definitive which are open to vicarious interpretations with mastrioanni delivering an inexhaustibly fascinating act where he is virtually the centre piece in every sequence, though both anouk aimee and anita ekberg lack neither dazzling beauty or emotionally charged exchanges which leave the beholder stunned by their tantalising talent .  This is livid ,angry ,elegiac wistful art which is intensely provoking and yet historically relevant laden with icons like the religious images mingled with sexual orgies and it is a testament to the travesty of modern existence that history will judge in its own time .
usman khawaja
Featured
October 27th, 2009 1:52 amRating:      AN WISTFUL AND WISE ITALIAN CAPRICE IN CANDOUR  Fellini chooses sixties Rome to deliver an incisively hedonistic satire on modern contemporary european culture where degeneracy is fashionable and egomania out rules morality ,it becomes even more powerful as art and A SOCIAL statement when applied to the capital city of a religion that has itself become mostly a caprice , as the opening shot demonstrates in a mockery with two helicopters conveying a plaster statue of christ, being transported over the eclectic mix of ancient and ugly modern architectural design of Rome itself while semi -naked women sunbath on top of skyscrapers .  The main prodigal protagonist involved in this exorcism to retrieve some sense is marcello ,a journalist who leads a vacuous superficial life covering the modern day news coverage as a gossip columnist and converging the freak circus that news media has become itself .  He is belligerently intelligent and realises his redundant role in this lunatic milieu but as the rest of humanity he goes with the flow and the movie encompasses seven days in his frantic but uneventful life which is packed with events and disasters that will be ignored by him for the trivia that he exaggerates to sell his news media and that also echoes the indifference of humanity in general to anything of crucial importance while superficial instant trivia are celebrated in a gala cause .  The women in his life are almost marionettes to him as they serve the purpose of a convenience as sexual objects ,ranging from his frustrated mistress who attempts suicide in a desperate gesture to his indifference and the rather sybaritic socialite heiress he attaches himself to played by Anouk aimee ,who takes him on his wild adventures in her posh sports car .  The main event is his coverage of the arrival of a celebrity american actress visiting Roma played by Anita Ekberg who is the object of his desire and fascination like a sex toy while he interviews her and they mutually abuse and lusciously exploit each other in a degenerate manner , ultimately ending tragically in an icon of frustrated romance in the lush Trevi fountain .  The epic satire is set in spectacular nightclubs ,with gala revues and musical cabarets and aristocratic italian castles where the superficial rich parade in their extravaganza in degenerate profligacy indulging every selfish whim.  But it balances the act with showing the realistic squalor in inner Rome and the exploitation of the vulnerable who survive in despair on the fringes of this extroverted existence .  Marcello is chasing a quest for happiness and love which is impossible to achieve even in an impossible dream like the symbolic sequence portrayed between him and Ekberg in the Trevi fountain which is the epitome of romantic travesty .  Yet the final orgy in a beach house following the sensually intricate yet intellectually provoking ARISTOCRATIC party in a suburban Roman castle shows the reality of a degenerate culture in the most profound cynicism to be ever witnessed in cinema .  The recurrent enchanting musical encores and the Balenciaga wardrobe just goes to provide the metaphorical sallow glamour and beauty which the pallid human spirit has lost in the centre of the great european civilisation and the absolute doom is demonstrated in a horrific sub-plot which covers the tragic, yet perfect life of a rich intellectual played by alan cluny ,who serves fellini as a metaphor for the ultimate fate of a festering and decaying civilisation .  The events are abjure and alternately definitive which are open to vicarious interpretations with mastrioanni delivering an inexhaustibly fascinating act where he is virtually the centre piece in every sequence, though both anouk aimee and anita ekberg lack neither dazzling beauty or emotionally charged exchanges which leave the beholder stunned by their tantalising talent .  This is livid ,angry ,elegiac wistful art which is intensely provoking and yet historically relevant laden with icons like the religious images mingled with sexual orgies and it is a testament to the travesty of modern existence that history will judge in its own time .
Technoguy
Featured
This is a young man's film(Fellini) and centred on a remarkable young actor,Mastroianni,the cynical young reporter at the heart of the movie.I saw this 30 years a go and was saturated with it's 60s stereotypes in an age of transition from the sacred to the profane.The passing away of religion is symbolized by the carriage of Christ through the sky,parodying the 2nd Coming;also by the large dead fish washed up at the end on the shore.The 'sweet life' of the title does not exist.Drunkenness,despair and decadence stalk the Via Veneto,brothels,car parks ,night clubs and palaces for the diletante Marcello,who is searching for love and for a deeper life.He thinks his intellectual friend Steiner,married with 2 kids has the key.He holds musical and poetic soirees in his home.He also wants to write a novel.The fecundity of a young maestro's imagination is revealed in a ballet of movement and sound,the choreography of the camera,the motion of the actors.Cinema has since shed all such approaches to narrative like a snakeskin perhaps for the better as the focus has evolved and narrowed.The film remarkably lasts for 3 hours,which is hard to believe and could have done with some editing.Night and dawn alternate.The ending is poignant:a young girl wants to remind him of the novel he wanted to write someday,but he is hung over and cannot hear her shouting over the waves and her message is lost.
Technoguy
Featured
This is a young man's film(Fellini) and centred on a remarkable young actor,Mastroianni,the cynical young reporter at the heart of the movie.I saw this 30 years a go and was saturated with it's 60s stereotypes in an age of transition from the sacred to the profane.The passing away of religion is symbolized by the carriage of Christ through the sky,parodying the 2nd Coming;also by the large dead fish washed up at the end on the shore.The 'sweet life' of the title does not exist.Drunkenness,despair and decadence stalk the Via Veneto,brothels,car parks ,night clubs and palaces for the diletante Marcello,who is searching for love and for a deeper life.He thinks his intellectual friend Steiner,married with 2 kids has the key.He holds musical and poetic soirees in his home.He also wants to write a novel.The fecundity of a young maestro's imagination is revealed in a ballet of movement and sound,the choreography of the camera,the motion of the actors.Cinema has since shed all such approaches to narrative like a snakeskin perhaps for the better as the focus has evolved and narrowed.The film remarkably lasts for 3 hours,which is hard to believe and could have done with some editing.Night and dawn alternate.The ending is poignant:a young girl wants to remind him of the novel he wanted to write someday,but he is hung over and cannot hear her shouting over the waves and her message is lost.

Film/Classic: La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini
La Dolce Vita
Directed by Frederico Fellini with Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Nadia Gray, Yvonne Furneaux, Anouk Aim�e, Magali Noe, Alain Cluny and Lex Barker, black-and-white, 167 minutes, 1960
Cover of VHS tape edition of "La DolceVita" shows Marcello Mastroianni and Yvonne Furneaux
By Carter B. Horsley
Although the Cold War was raging, the 1950s were a decade of relative peace and comfortability. It was a time of "the good life." In America, the suburbs were burgeoning and television was transforming the culture. In Europe, the recovery from the ravages of World War II was well advanced. Mankind was entering the Space Age and technology promised a bright future.
"La Dolce Vita" was filmed in 1959 in and around Rome and much of it was shot in post-war, redeveloped neighborhoods. Its lead character, Marcello Rubini, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is a writer for gossip tabloids and hangs around the Via Veneto with the paparazzi, the photographers who sell their pictures of celebrities to the scandal sheets. The paparazzi had already been around for a while, and have survived decades later and their "culture" has become much more pervasive than when the film was made, one of the many reasons why this masterpiece has remained a classic.
The film's title means "The Sweet Life," and refers to the decadence of the upper classes. In America, Jackie Gleason, the comic, had a popular television program in which one of his famous lines was "How sweet it is." Although one of his characters, Reginald Van Gleason, was a black-tie rapscallion with a toy train set always at the ready to transport to him his supply of booze, Gleason's "sweet" was joyful and not sardonic as Fellini's.
"La Dolce Vita" is a devastatingly bleak portrait of a troubled soul who cannot resist the good things of life and whose amusement at the vapidness of rich wastrels on which he makes his living eventually engulfs him and makes him no different.
The film was banned for many years in Italy because of its depiction of many Italians, at least the rich ones, as degenerate, selfish, spoiled souls, its blatant sexuality, and also because of its substantial, irreverent religious content that offended many Catholics.
Italian film after World War II was noted for its realism. Movies such as "Open City," "Shoeshine" and "Bicycle Thief" were immensely powerful narratives of the plight of the poor. Fellini was not inured to the poor and indeed his great 1954 film, "La Strada," was about poor circus folk.
"La Dolce Vita" is a landmark film that does not turn its back on the poor while focusing on the care-free well-to-do, and, more importantly, brutally raises difficult questions about the goodness of man and the meaning of life. Marcello disintegrates and is corrupted and by the end of the film has become a wretched and weary, miserable and mean person, although the final scene suggests he still has some respect for innocence.
This is a long, episodic film of great scenes. It opens with a memorable aerial shot of a statue of Jesus being borne by a helicopter over Rome followed by another helicopter with a journalist and a photographer. It passes over the Coliseum, construction sites, sunbathing women on a rooftop and St. Peter's Square.
The journalist is Marcello and he drives a Triumph sports car and has a beautiful fianc�, Emma, played by Yvonne Fureaux, who has conventional values and wants to get married and have children. He is, however, besotted with the lives of the rich and famous and has a roving eye. Early in the film he encounters Sylvia, an extremely voluptuous and beautiful movie star, played by Anita Ekberg, and is madly infatuated.
Detail of still from film, showing Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in Trevi Fountain in Rome, used as frontispiece for Jerry Vermilye's "Great Italian Films" published by Carol Publishing Company, 1994
At one point, she wades into the Trevi fountain and he joins her as shown in the above photograph that is the frontispiece for Jerry Vermilye's very excellent book, "Great Italian Films," (published by Citadel Press, Carol Publishing Company, 1994, $17.95). With her very long tresses and fabulous, low-cut, evening gown, Sylvia is Aphrodite incarnate and the scene is one of the most famous in film history.
In his fine book, "Conversations with Fellini," (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1995), Costanzo Costantini, relates the following comments from his interviews with the director about this scene:
"For me the film is identified more with Anita Ekberg than with the Via Veneto. She possessed incredible beauty. I have never seen anyone like her; she made a great impression on me. Later the same day I met Marcello Mastroianni, who later told me that Ekberg reminded him of a storm trooper in the Wehrmacht, but really he didn't want to admit that even he had never before seen such marvelous and unbelievable beauty. She remained immersed in the basin for ages, motionless, impassive, as if the water didn't cover her nor the cold affect her, even though it was March and the nights made one shiver. For Mastroianni, it was a rather different story. To combat the cold he polished off a bottle of vodka, and when we shot the scene he was completely pissed."
Costantini goes on to quote Fellini to the effect that Dino De Laurentis had wanted Paul Newman for the role of the journalist: "How could Paul Newman be believable as a journalist in the Via Veneto, when he himself would have been the object of the chasing pack of paparazzi? What was required was an actor who wasn't a household name. I remember De Laurentis saying to me, `He's too soft and goody-goody; a family man rather than the type who flings women onto the bed.' As an alternative to Paul Newman he suggested G�rard Philipe, but that came to nothing and he ended up giving up the film."
Mastroianni, of course, would go to become one of the greatest stars in film history and his performance in this movie is sensational, ranging from child-like amusement to adoration to arrogance, rage to respect, all with great charm and elegance. His character is extremely complex - cynical but insecure, observant but obsessed. He is dissatisfied with life and not content to settle down with his adoring fianc� and is easily distracted by beautiful women.
One of the film's highlights is a party thrown by Steiner, a musician and intellectual, played with great panache by Alain Cluny, who suggests he can get Marcello a publisher so he can give up writing gossip and concentrate on something more important. Marcello appears grateful and implies he will give it serious consideration. He clearly is impressed by Steiner who admits the following:
"Sometimes at night the darkness and silence weighs upon me. Peace frightens me; perhaps I fear it most of all. I feel it is only a fa�ade hiding the face of hell. I think, `What is in store for my children tomorrow?' `The world will be wonderful,' they say. But from whose viewpoint? If one phone call could announce the end of everything? We need to live in a state of suspended animation like a work of art, in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside of time, detached."
This enchantment is a distraction, of course, from reality and the "face of hell." Is not gossip a distraction? Is Steiner suggesting that even art is a distraction? He admits that he is "too serious to be an amateur and not serious enough to be a professional." His coterie of friends are a cultured lot, one ranting about Oriental women, another about poetry. It is refined bonhomie, an alert salon, a rarefied gathering. Marcello clearly sees Steiner's invitation to see one another more often as attractive and positive.
It is, therefore, with great shock that later in the film Steiner commits suicide and kills his two children, whom he obviously loved a great deal. Marcello offers to go with a detective and point out his wife who is returning home only to have to fend off the paparazzi, whom we have seen earlier in the film posing the parents of two children who have seen the Madonna in a "miracle."
Marcello has a touching encounter with his father who he takes to a nightclub. When the father later gets ill, Marcello implores him to stay with him but the father leaves to go catch a train. Marcello is extremely affectionate, realizing that he has not seen much of his father and perhaps eager to understand him and therefore part of himself better.
He runs off to a party in a villa where he encounters Maddalena, played with inviting promiscuity by Anouk Aim�e, who at one point has him sit in a room while she whispers to him mysteriously from another suggesting that they get married. Marcello impetuously agrees, but she has already succumbed to the advances of another man at the party. The party scene of aristocrats and playboys includes a s�ance.
Marcello breaks off with his fianc� in an astonishingly angry scene in which he leaves her stranded on a road. He returns hours later to pick her up but only continues his tirades at her "selfishness": "it's not love, it's animalism."
At another point in the film, he is typing a story while on the terrace of a country restaurant where he asks the young waitress, Paola, played by Valeria Ciangottini, to turn off the bouncy music. They engage in a conversation and he remarks that she reminds him of an "Umbrian angel." At the end of the film, she reappears and yells to him across a tidal basin but he cannot understand her because of the noise of the sea. He smiles and waves goodbye to her.
He had gone to the beach because a crowd of people were clustered around a "sea monster" that had been caught up in a net and washed ashore. He had been up all night a party for Nadia, played with stylish sophistication by Nadia Gray, who was celebrating her divorce. At the party, Nadia does a striptease, but the jaded partygoers, some of whom are openly homosexual, are not satisfied and Marcello, who has become a publicity agent, proceeds to insult various guests and stick feathers on one woman and ride her like a horse. He has become beastly.
Had Fellini ended the film without the final striptease party, and even without the reappearance and rejection of the Umbrian angel, we might have despaired for Marcello as Modern Man, not satisfied by traditional religion, not content with the trappings of the elite, the trappings of marriage, the trappings of affairs, still searching for answers.
We are aghast, however, at how Marcello has taken a turn for the worse, to put it mildly. Despite his great looks and charm, he has become not merely shallow, but evil. His evil, however, is not premeditated. He is lashing out in protest at his own unhappiness and while his smile and wave at the Umbrian angel indicates that he still has a spark of humanity he is in a drunken stupor and no longer conscious enough to care much about her. He has crossed over into an oblivion and whatever message Fellini might have wanted to convey is pessimistic.
This is a work about fervor. It is about the intensity and weight of life.
Marcello is magnificently attractive and has a pretty good life. His fianc� is a great beauty. Sylvia succumbs to his charms as does Madallena and Fanny, a nightclub dancer who takes his father to her apartment and who is obviously one of Marcello's past lovers.
Sylvia is a remarkable force of nature and when she answers a cat's howling even Marcello is amazed and astonished. She contrasts greatly with Madallena, a much more complex woman. They and Nadia are extremely strong, independent women in contrast with the innocence of Emma and the waitress, but they all are merely objects for Marcello.
The film is visually wonderful, full of great tracking shots and compositions, and it has a marvelous and delightful score by Nina Rota.
The evolution of Marcello's dark side is, of course, accentuated by Steiner's suicide. If as sensitive and erudite a man as Steiner not only kills himself but his two children, what hope can there be for Marcello, and for us?
While this film goes beyond cynicism, existentialism and hedonism, it is thoroughly engrossing, intellectual and psychologically riveting but it is also coy and earthy.
It takes us beyond the vicarious and ruthless sensationalism of the paparazzi to the inner torments of the soul. There, life is neither sweet nor bittersweet, but pulses with an energy of its own that drives our curiosities and makes us mere mortals so curious.
This film ranks 7th in Carter B. Horsley's Top 500 Sound Films list.