LA DOLCE VITA Movie Review
The Sweet Life
Upon returning to my hotel after a late movie during the 1997 Telluride Film Festival, the TV informed me that a car accident had taken the life of Princess Diana. The CNN newscaster reported that the crash scene had been besieged by paparazzi. For an instant I wondered if the image that next popped into my head was only there because I was at a film festival, but I don't think so. The sudden flashback to the flashbulbs, snapping shutters, and pushing and shoving of the viciously aggressive photographers in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita would have entered my head anywhere I heard the news. It's not only that the term paparazzo was coined in reference to the movie's Signor Paparazzo; the film itself has become a nearly universal, communal vision of modern society's fascination with celebrity, glamour, scandal, and decadence, trapped forever in amber by The Maestro. For the three hours of La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), the bored tabloid reporter Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) complains, suffers, and vents his frustration over not being a journalist of a higher caliber. But Marcello knows who he is, and he is in thrall to the decadent and hedonistic pleasures that surround him. (And if Fellini has given us a single bit of visual shorthand for that hedonism, it's Marcello and movie starlet Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) frolicking at night in the Trevi Fountain.) Eventually, after a friend commits a horribly violent act, and after reporting on a faked religious miracle that has shattered the faith of hundreds, Marcello throws in the towel. He can no longer—literally—hear the words of the one “good” woman he's encountered, and he wanders off to lose himself completely in a world of shallowness. A vast morality play disguised as a mesmerizing peep show. La Dolce Vita is, on the one hand, tempting to dismiss as Fellini's knee-jerk, overreaction to a generation's vanishing sense of purpose—the kind of movie Dan Quayle might make if he could spell paparazzi. Still, one can't deny that La Dolce Vita's mythological cultural landscape has both staying power and artistic power. It's a part of us, ready to spring back to buoyant life whenever events warrant—just like tabloid journalism, and just like our own nagging regrets about the high road not taken. Oscar nominations for Director, Screenplay, and Art Direction; Oscar Winner for Costume Design.
NEXT STOP … I Vitelloni, Fellini Satyricon, Ikiru
1960 174m/B IT Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Alain Cuny, Lex Barker, Yvonne Furneaux, Barbara Steele, Nadia Gray, Magali Noel, Walter Santesso, Jacques Sernas, Annibale Ninchi; D: Federico Fellini; W: Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi, Federico Fellini; M: Nino Rota. Academy Awards '61: Best Costume Design (B & W); Cannes Film Festival '60: Best Film; New York Film Critics Awards '61: Best Foreign Film; Nominations: Academy Awards '61: Best Art Direction/Set Decoration (B & W), Best Director (Fellini), Best Story & Screenplay. VHS, LV, Letterbox REP