Movie Notes: La Dolce Vita

January 20th, 2008

La Dolce Vita

= 4 stars

Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee
Directed by Federico Fellini

$La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector\'s Edition)$

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Depending on your stage in life (or what sort of mood you’re in), La Dolce Vita is either joyous and celebratory or brutally disgusting. It celebrates life’s contrast, the swing from light to dark.

Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) is a reporter, one who runs around with rabid photographers chasing celebrities, making connections and exploiting them. The backdrop is Rome, itself a mix of old and new, sacred and profane. Marcello whisks from one opportunity to the next, more often than not starting late at night and fixing on one situation until dawn. The film’s pattern is episodic, one evening bleeding into beautiful nocturnal chaos, with some lessons learned but immediately forgotten when the sun rises.

Director Federico Fellini is masterful at filming elegant anarchy: parades of eccentrics drift across the screen, likely improvising but looking choreographed. Camera men swarm over a widow’s car like a pile of ants. The crush of a raptured crowd baptized by an untimely downpour. The startled look of a just-transpired accident, sad yet beautiful, and you feel lucky and blessed to have witnessed a rare event. Many scenes are so perfectly captured that it takes your breath away, from the stunning aerial helicopter opening to the the energetic cafe dance party instigated by Sylvia (Anita Ekberg). It’s amazing to witness such splendor and it requires constant reminder that this is 1960, black and white, subtitled, and no CGI or $100 million budget here.

Above all this activity is an arching romantic theme, though it’s deliberately ambiguous what it is. It could be Marcello’s search for love and finding there’s a lack of it in his world. Along the way he finds plenty of opportunities for unbridled passion and lust. A case of someone getting what they want but not what they need.

Fellini adds an odd religious thread through the proceedings. A statue of Jesus flies in by helicopter. A young innocent girl is compared to a cathedral angel. Two children see the Madonna and nearly cause a riot. And the seven nights and seven days? The sea monster at film’s end is likely symbolic of something that cannot entirely be explained. It’s just sadly appropriate that the girl across the inlet can’t communicate with Marcello, forever lost in his own world.

As with 8 1/2 the film is filled with eccentric characters. An aristocrat’s party in an abandoned castle is filled with slouchy denizens and groggy duchesses straight from an Edward Gorey cartoon. While many are just useless beauty, every character has their moments of appeal and annoyance, further pushing the point home about life’s rich contrasts. Maddalena (Anouk Aimee) proposes marriage to Marcello but is soon in the arms of another lover. Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), a bombshell Swedish actress who defines “busty blonde,” is Marcello’s voluptuous magical muse who proves to be more interested in a stray kitten than Marcello’s advances. Marcello’s fiance Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) vows her undying love but is far too clingy and needy, demonstrating the down side to devotion. Each is somewhat compatible with Marcello not enough to satisfy him completely. Marcello’s father is at once charming and scarily perverse, an older man whose heart goes to places his aged body cannot follow. And lastly, Steiner (Alain Cuny), Marcello’s successful wealthy friend, commits an unspeakable act that nobody, not even his wife, can explain.

Steiner is an interesting character as he represents something held out as the ideal in modern society. He’s wealthy, has a large house, two children and a home, and interesting friends. Marcello approaches him at a party and comments that someday he’d like to have a life like this; Steiner’s home is a “refuge.” Steiner’s response is that it bores him and that it isn’t that great, that he is basically living in a sort of detached, suspended animation. What does this mean? Is it a case of getting what you want, but don’t need?

Through these contrasts, La Dolce Vita is intent on showing us the good and the bad; many scenes left me wondering whether I should laugh or cry. At a late night party, a drunken Marcello throws pillow feathers all over an inebriated lass. Rustic architecture is surrounded by crumbling, antiseptic apartment complexes. A religious event which for a moment makes us believers, devolves into a clumsy riot as a mob selfishly dismantles a lone, weak tree that is supposed to be the centerpiece of the vision. Marcello is surrounded by strange and wonderful people but is essentially alone emotionally. The film leaves you with the feeling the old cliche that you can’t know sugar until you’ve had sour; and one can’t truly appreciate life’s ups until you’ve endured bitterly through its lows. That is the essence of La Dolce Vita and the price we pay for being human. It’s to the film’s testament that this comes across in a sideways and truly entertaining fashion.

IMDB: La Dolce Vita
Wikipedia: La Dolce Vita
Rotten Tomatoes: La Dolce Vita 100%