La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)

La Dolce Vita is a film enshrined in the pantheon of the best of the best. Widely deemed Italian master Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, its influence on pop culture is found everywhere from People magazine to Lost in Translation. Oh how I hungered to finally see this film.

But in my humble opinion, La Dolce Vita did not turn out to be the full course Italian dinner I expected; it was more like a slice of Domino’s pizza—passable but hardly exciting.

Most likely, I have simply not understood the complexities of La Dolce Vita, and I do not feel like sitting through a 3 hour commentary at this moment. It is certainly a film I will have to revisit after watching Fellini’s earlier works.
La Dolce Vita’s structure is high episodic, and the film itself is nearly 3 hours long. To sum it up, the film is a series of episodes about journalist Marcello’s encounters with his jaded lover (Anouk Aimee), a ditzy American startlet (Anita Eckberg), his suicidal fiancée, his irresponsible father, various prostitutes, his inwardly troubled friend, his photographer colleagues, and his ridiculously rich friends. The disjointed structure is obviously intentional, but it seems to fracture the film into installments too sporadic to gel into one unified film. Even as I type this, I realize that the last scene with the café girl does pull together many thematic and narrative strands.

At its core, La Dolce Vita is a satire and condemnation of the moral debauchery of the upper class. Under a glamorous exterior, the rich are revealed as shallow, corrupted, ignorant, and immoral. This is no profound realization, but La Dolce Vita does provide an intriguing portrait of Via Valento’s glitterati. The problem is, as Marcello himself says of the rich, “You’re really not that interesting.” Marcello views the world of the rich as both a cynical outsider and an eager admirer, and as fascinating as the glitterati may seem, it isn’t long before their lives—and the film—become tedious.

La Dolce Vita is more coldly cynical and emotionally distraught than I had expected. This is not a point of criticism, but an observation on how the film is remembered as whole. I was always under the impression that it was a playful romp—in the vein of Moulin Rouge!—through the lives of the rich and famous.

The dark tone of La Dolce Vita does give it moments of cold, seductive beauty. The scene where Maddalena asks Marcello to marry her through a stone speaker while simultaneously making love to another man is one of the most fascinating sequences I have ever seen. The miscommunication evident throughout the film is most clearly represented in Maddalena’s disembodied voice floating down to Marcello sitting in an empty room. As Marcello replies that he loves her, Maddalena is passionately wrapped in the arms another man.

I don’t think that Fellini is remembered as a particularly political filmmaker, but he does throw in many jabs at the Catholic Church in La Dolce Vita. While I found the Madonna sequence intrusive (mainly because his deranged fiancée Emma spent so much time in it), the opening scene with “Jesus” flying through the sky is justly remembered as ingenious.

I guess my final opinion toward La Dolce Vita is one of indifference toward it as a whole, but awe at certain scenes in the movie. (I have yet to mention the famous dip in the fountain portrayed in the above picture). My feelings, however, seem to be tipping to a more favorable opinion the more I think about it. This last paragraph reminds me an awful lot about another review I wrote…