La Dolce Vita (1960)

The Sweet Life

La Dolce Vita is one of the great films about the emptiness of a glamorous life. It follows a Roman gossip journalist through a series of parties, affairs, scandals and nights out, and on the surface it’s dazzling: beautiful people, beautiful places, famous faces and endless fun. Underneath, it’s a portrait of a man slowly losing himself, and by the end it’s almost unbearably sad.

Federico Fellini directed it, and it came out in 1960. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, caused a scandal in Italy, was condemned by the Vatican, and became an international sensation. It runs nearly three hours, and it’s episodic, wandering and slow in places. I give it a 10. It’s one of the most influential films ever made, and it gets more moving with every viewing.

A Statue Over Rome

The film opens with an image everyone knows. A helicopter flies over Rome, carrying a huge statue of Christ hanging from a cable, over ancient aqueducts, new apartment blocks and a group of women sunbathing on a rooftop. A second helicopter follows, carrying Marcello, the journalist, who tries to get the women’s phone numbers over the roar of the engines.

In a few minutes, Fellini sets out the whole film: the sacred and the profane side by side, old Rome and new Rome, spirituality turned into spectacle and a man more interested in pretty strangers than in anything the statue might mean. It’s funny, strange and beautiful, and it announces a completely new kind of film.

The statue is being delivered to the Vatican, and it passes over the modern city like a visitor from another age, largely ignored by the people below. Fellini never comments on it. He simply shows us a world where even the sacred has become something to be flown about and photographed, and lets the image settle in our minds as the film moves on.

Marcello

Marcello Mastroianni plays Marcello Rubini, a handsome, charming, weary journalist who writes gossip for scandal sheets and dreams of becoming a serious writer. He spends his nights on the Via Veneto, Rome’s glamorous street of cafés and nightclubs, chasing celebrities, parties and women, and his days recovering. He has a devoted, possessive fiancée, Emma, whom he treats badly, and a restless affair with a wealthy heiress, Maddalena, and he can’t commit to either.

Mastroianni is extraordinary. He plays Marcello as a man of real intelligence and sensitivity who keeps choosing the easy, shallow option, and who knows it. He’s never a villain and rarely a hero. He’s a drifter, drawn to beauty and meaning and always settling for pleasure, and Mastroianni makes his gradual decline painful to watch. It made him an international star, and it ranks with the great performances in European cinema.

He’s also, in effect, the film’s audience. We follow him into every party and every scandal, enjoying the glamour, and slowly we begin to feel, as he does, how little any of it means. Fellini traps us in the same pleasures that trap Marcello, and the film’s judgement lands on us as much as on him.

The Trevi Fountain

The most famous sequence belongs to Sylvia, a Swedish-American film star visiting Rome, played by Anita Ekberg. Marcello follows her around the city, fascinated, and late at night, she wades into the Trevi Fountain in a black evening dress and calls to him to join her. He does, fully clothed, and stands before her in the water, about to kiss her, as dawn breaks and the fountain is turned off.

The image is endlessly imitated and referenced. It’s also, in context, a scene about longing and disappointment. Sylvia is grand, childlike and unreachable, and Marcello’s awe turns into something closer to worship. The moment the water stops, the spell breaks, and the night ends in a slap from her jealous boyfriend.

Ekberg became a star, and the fountain became a tourist attraction that, for decades afterward, people tried to wade into, until the authorities banned it. The scene became so bound up with the fountain that, for many visitors, the two are impossible to separate, and it has done as much for Rome’s image as any guidebook.

Paparazzo

Marcello is always accompanied by a photographer named Paparazzo, one of a pack of aggressive, intrusive photographers who follow celebrities on their scooters, hounding them for pictures. The character’s name, reportedly taken from a word for a buzzing insect or from an old book, became the word for celebrity photographers all over the world: paparazzi.

It’s quite a legacy for a minor character, and it proves how clearly Fellini saw the world that was coming. La Dolce Vita is one of the first films about celebrity culture, the hunger for fame and scandal, and the media that feeds on both, and it anticipated much of what the next sixty years would bring.

The photographers in the film are relentless, swarming around grieving widows, fighting stars and anyone who might sell a picture. A deeply disturbing scene shows them descending on a woman who has just received terrible news, flashbulbs popping, before she even knows what has happened. Fellini understood exactly how cruel the business of celebrity could be.

Seven Episodes

The film is structured as a series of episodes, often described as seven, each following Marcello through a day or a night. There’s the visiting star. A fake miracle, where two children claim to have seen the Virgin Mary, and a crowd of believers, journalists and television crews gathers in a field in the pouring rain. An evening with Marcello’s elderly father, visiting from the provinces. A decadent party at an aristocrat’s crumbling castle.

The episodes are loosely connected, and the film has no conventional plot. It’s a mosaic of Roman life, from the aristocracy to the working poor, from believers to intellectuals to celebrities, and it’s held together by Marcello’s gaze. Some episodes are funny, some are sad, some are dull, and together they build a portrait of a society, and a man, losing their way.

Fellini’s style is loose and restless, full of crowds, noise and wandering camera movements, and it creates a feeling of endless nights and endless drift. It’s hypnotic, and it can be exhausting, and both are deliberate. By the end, the audience feels the fatigue of the endless nights just as Marcello does.

Steiner

The film’s emotional centre is Marcello’s friend Steiner, an intellectual played by Alain Cuny, who seems to have everything Marcello wants: a beautiful home, a loving wife, two children, a circle of artists and writers, and a life of the mind. Marcello admires him deeply and hopes to become like him.

Steiner confides that he’s afraid, that his calm, ordered life feels fragile and hollow and that he envies people who are free. Later, a shocking tragedy at Steiner’s home destroys his family, and it devastates Marcello. The one person he saw as a model of a meaningful life turns out to have been as lost as he is.

After this, the film’s tone darkens. Marcello gives up his dream of serious writing and becomes a publicist, and the final episodes show a man who has stopped searching for meaning altogether. The film never says it outright, but Steiner’s fate seems to convince Marcello that looking for a deeper life is pointless, and the rest of the story shows what that belief costs him.

The Last Party

The last major episode is a party at a beach house, where Marcello, now working in publicity, leads a group of bored, rich revellers through a drunken, cruel night of games, stripteases and humiliations. It’s the film’s bleakest sequence, and Marcello, once charming, has become crude, spiteful and lost. It’s hard to watch, because we’ve spent the whole film liking him.

At dawn, the partygoers wander onto the beach, where fishermen have hauled in a strange, dead sea creature, a monstrous ray with a staring eye. They gather around it, staring back. The image is haunting, often read as a symbol of the decadence and spiritual death the film has been circling, and Fellini leaves it unexplained.

The contrast between the partygoers, pale and exhausted in their evening clothes, and the bright morning sea is striking. After a night of cruelty and pretence, nature offers them something strange and real, and they can only gawk at it. It’s among the film’s most powerful images, and it leads directly into its final, quietest moment.

Paola

The film’s final moment is a famous ending. Across a stretch of water on the beach, Marcello sees Paola, a young, innocent waitress he met earlier at a seaside café, who had reminded him of an angel in a painting. She calls to him and gestures, but the wind and the waves drown out her words, and he can’t hear her.

He shrugs, smiles and turns back to his friends. Paola watches him go, and then she turns to the camera and smiles. The ending is quiet and devastating. The innocence and grace Marcello once longed for are right in front of him, trying to reach him, and he can no longer hear it.

The Scandal

La Dolce Vita caused an uproar in Italy. The Vatican’s newspaper condemned it, some politicians called for it to be banned, and screenings were met with protests. Its depiction of the decadence of the Roman upper classes, the commercialisation of religion and the emptiness of modern life struck a nerve. Fellini, a Catholic, was accused of blasphemy by some and defended by others as a moralist.

It was also a huge success, one of the biggest in Italian history, and it won the Palme d’Or. It made Fellini world-famous and introduced a new, loose, episodic style of storytelling that influenced filmmakers for decades. Nino Rota’s score, playful and melancholy, became famous in its own right.

What La Dolce Vita Gets Right

Because it captures something true about modern life that has only become more true since: the pursuit of pleasure and fame, the hunger for meaning, and the way the first can drown out the second. It’s glamorous and seductive, and it makes us feel the seduction, and then it shows us the cost.

That’s a film of great beauty and invention, full of images that have become part of the language of cinema, and a performance from Mastroianni that belongs with the greatest ever given. It’s long, and it asks for patience. It gives back an experience few films can match.

Craft Note

The Verdict on La Dolce Vita

Yes. It’s a 10 and one of the greatest films ever made. It’s long and episodic, and it asks for patience. Watch it for Mastroianni, for the Trevi Fountain and for the girl on the beach, and let it slowly break your heart.

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