La Dolce Vita: Film Review by Bill Doherty

For Fellini’s centenary, one of his landmark films La Dolce Vita has been rereleased, 60 years after its triumphant debut in 1960. As an aficionado of Italian cinema in my youth I jumped at the chance to fill in one of the remaining lacunae of those days and catch the re-release. It’s a 3-hour epic but fortunately my buttocks had been pre-conditioned by attending Martin Scorsese’s 3hours and 20 minute gangster yarn, The Irishman.   

The Italy portrayed in the film is the rapidly industrialising nation of the 1950s where northern and central Italy’s prosperity drew in more than a million migrants from the backward, impoverished south, the theme of Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, also released in 1960.  The stunning opening sequence lays the ground for the narrative. Two helicopters pass slowly and noisily over the Roman skyline. The first has a life size statue of Christ with arms stretching forwards, suspended from its undercarriage presumably en route to an elevated niche on a church in the city. The passengers in the second are the film’s central protagonist, Marcello Rubini, and his photographer, Paparazzo. Marcello, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is a gossip columnist/society journalist who still nurses serious literary aspirations. As Christ hovers over St. Peter’s Square and the dome of the Basilica, the second helicopter lingers over the flat roof of a modern apartment block as Marcello tries with frantic sign language to elicit the phone number of the four excited, bikini-clad young women sunbathing on the rooftop. While allegory hunters might seize on this image as a portrayal of the second coming of Christ, the more prosaically inclined viewer would register the blueprint for a story featuring mammon, sex and religion. 

Marcello’s profession allows a febrile, turbo-charged plot where he storms from one media sensation to the next – film stars’ press conferences, an episode of mass religious hysteria, night club vignettes, suicides, enigmatic soirées in intellectuals’ salons and dilapidated aristocratic castles culminating in a gate-crashed party in a seaside villa where one partygoer celebrates her divorce by performing a striptease for the edification of the assembled company.  Morning breaks on the funsters gathered on the beach surveying a dead (but open- eyed) coelacanth dragged from the sea in a net by 4 fishermen. An allegory hunter might chip in with “Canst though draw out Leviathan with an hook?” and consider whether the fishermen’s estimate that the creature was 3 days dead might be a Resurrection metaphor.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Fellini joins the dots on this sequence of frantic episodes but there is an evident underlying theme in Marcello’s tortured relationships with a series of women. The early scenes introduce Emma, his overwrought but generally ignored fiancée, driven to attempting suicide by Marcello’s recurring failure to reciprocate her affection. Anouk Aimée plays Maddalena who has a cynical, transactional liaison with Marcello letting us ponder whether she is a society beauty or a high-class prostitute although her mask slips in an intriguing scene where she reveals tender feelings for Marcello from an echo chamber. As many critics were quick to point out, Anita Ekberg plays……..Anita Ekberg!  As an American diva, she lures an enraptured Marcello into the Trevi fountain, creating the film’s most iconic scene. Testament to the vigour of Scandinavian womanhood, the far from overdressed Ekberg managed the several nocturnal hours shooting this scene without complaint while the Italian stallion, Mastroianni, had to wear a wet-suit under his clothes! Marcello has a puzzling relationship with a teenage Umbrian girl, first glimpsed serving him breakfast at a seaside café as he wrestles with his Muse at a typewriter, trying to work on his book. Marcello promises to help her learn to type to obtain a job in Rome. In the final scene on the beach, she exchanges hopeful looks with Marcello and they communicate by signs because of the noise of the crashing waves and the physical barrier of an intervening watercourse. Still miming incomprehension, Marcello is dragged away by a female partygoer back into the insubstantial social froth of life, la schiuma della vita – echoing his failure to get the telephone number in the opening scenes?  

Anorak Notes    

·         Although the film is a social satire on Italy in the 1950s, Marcello’s roadster which features prominently (often hosting a dangerous gaggle of passengers) is British – a Triumph TR3.

·         Marcello’s photographer, Paparazzo, has bequeathed his name to a whole media genus who are ubiquitous in the film, a rabid posse after the same prey.

·         Rock fans would notice the glamorous blonde, Nico, who was to be the female vocalist with Lou Reed’s New York band The Velvet Underground  in producing one of the top 20 LPs of all time.  

Conclusion    

If you like tight logical plot lines, this film is not for you but if you are prepared to immerse yourself in a sub-Joycean flow of consciousness with wonderful black and white camera work, I would suggest giving it a go. If you have missed The Irishman you could always bring a cushion!