La Dolce Vita (1960)

Directed by Federico Fellini.
Starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg.

In a Nutshell: A gossip journalist spends a hedonistic week in Rome.

“This is the art I prefer. The one I think we’ll need tomorrow. A clear, precise art without rhetoric, that doesn’t lie, that isn’t flattering. Now I have a job that I don’t like, but I often think about tomorrow.” The words by detached journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) describe the ideal purpose of art, the art he enjoys. Fellini is far too extroverted, far too unambiguous a director to hide this self-commentary, but this time he has earned it. La Dolce Vita lets the ecstasy and muddy morality of post-war Rome wash over its audience; all the objectivity of neo-realism with Fellini’s loving theatrics. Marcello’s week yields seven vignettes; each swims in decadent fantasy before staggering into the bleak dawn. Portraying Fellini’s alter ego, Marcello acts as agent and observer but never the moralizer.

Comparatively tame by today’s excesses, the film does not risk frolic for fright. Every scene that whetted 60’s audiences for “the sweet life” found itself anchored with startling reality. By the time a reactive, self-loathing Marcello derails a listless orgy, the film feels exhausted by Rome’s lost glamour. La Dolce Vita is wonderfully expressive; the bluntness of its visual compositions fails to diminish the impact. Which made La Dolce Vita less revolutionary for how it communicated with its audience (though Fellini’s delicate balance between realism and caricature need not be overlooked) than the commentary itself.

And yet Fellini can wring a shot of Anita Ekberg frolicking in a fountain for all its worth. Fellini is an unabashedly indulgent director; I love him no less for it. But La Dolce Vita, with its deeply cynical backbone and glittering show-biz extravagance, hits a nerve that will never dull in our similarly materialistic age. Fellini never needed to reach for these truths; every memorable scene pulsates with an authenticity all its own. It is a rare experience of a movie, shamelessly baroque though hardly its own moral wasteland. As long as men like Marcello continue to claw through their own emptiness, La Dolce Vita will never go out of style.