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La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition) (1961) Review

The is a movie of stunning images that taken together provide a stunning and ironical montage of "the good life." In fact, by the end I was reminded simultaneously of Thoreau's statement that the mass of people live lives of quiet desperation and Kierkegaard's belief that the natural condition of human beings is that of despair. There is no plot. The movie consists of a series of loosely or unconnected scenes with little or not attempt to link them. Many of the scenes are stunning. Some are disturbing. None of them are boring, which is remarkable given the length of the film (166 minutes).
The beginning is memorable, with a helicopter flying over Rome with a statue of Christ hanging underneath. A celebrity journalist, portrayed brilliantly by Marcello Mastroianni (the original producer, Dino de Laurentiis, pulled out of the project when Fellini refused to cast Paul Newman in the lead role), is following the statue in order to write about it, but he and his team get distracted by women sunbathing in bikinis on a rooftop. In this and many other scenes, the tremendous gap between traditional and historical symbols of meaning and current preoccupation with mere pleasure is articulated. The overwhelming sense in the film is of the tremendous triviality of these people's lives and the loss of moral purpose. There are only two exceptions in the film: Marcello's close friend Steiner, whose life is a search for meaning and truth, and a young girl Marcello first meets at a restaurant where she is a food server and then sees again in the last few moments of the film. But Steiner's search is a futile one, leading him not merely to kill himself but his two children as well. And the young girl is not merely a symbol of innocence, but of innocence lost, not to be found again. In the last few seconds of the film, after a drunken debauch, Marcello walks to the seashore at dawn. There he sees the young girl across a watery divide. She waves to him, and tries to shout something to him. But her words are drowned by the waves and the wind, and eventually they both smile, realizing that they he will never be able to hear what she has to say. The way that Marcello wistfully shrugs his shoulders is almost an acknowledgement that he is one of the damned. It is one of the most heartbreaking moments in modern film, as well as one of the most poignant.
Rome itself is as prominent in this film as any of the characters, but it is not the Rome one finds in ROMAN HOLIDAY. Much of the city looks not historic or beautiful, but antiseptic, shoddily fabricated, barely reclaimed modern ruins. There are a number of ugly modernistic buildings and a number of the areas look bleak and abandoned. This is all, of course, highly symbolic of the bleakness of the lives of the characters. Many films have discussions like this imposed on them (I think of some of the magnificent parodies in episodes of Monty Python), but LA DOLCE VITA almost demands metaphysical discussion. Fellini is concerned with the fate of human beings in the modern world, with what we have all lost and what we have failed to acquire in its place.
Special mention has to be made of the extraordinary music for the film written by the incomparable Nino Rota, and easily stands as one of the very greatest film scores ever written, as integral to the success of the film as Bernard Hermann's scores for NORTH BY NORTHWEST or PSYCHO or Ennio Morricone's for A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. It is not epic or histrionic, but playful and light, almost ironic, as if to underscore the manner in which the characters whistle while Rome burns itself out.
A spectacular film, one of my favorites ever. It is arguably Fellini's greatest film, and one of the great monuments of cinema.

La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition) (1961) Overview

LA DOLCE VITA - DVD Movie

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