Just RE-watched...

...Fellini's masterpiece "La Dolce Vita" from 1960.

Hot on the heels of my recent trip to Italy, I just watched “La Dolce Vita,” Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece and bridge between his Neo-Realism roots and the Surrealism fueled by dream logic and dream imagery that he later explored and embraced. I watched this film twenty-some years ago, at a time when I had yet to visit Rome (I had somehow managed to skip Rome and see only Florence and Venice). I thought that seeing the film now, after a fresh trip to the Eternal City would be fun and allow me to see familiar sights. But Fellini was very careful to limit shots of ruins or anything that identifies the city to the rest of the world. Instead, he shows us row after row of sterile, concrete apartment buildings—many still under construction—and entire new Mussolini-style areas on the desolate outskirts of Rome in an effort to show the financial revitalization that was taking place in an Italy that had been devastated by the war (and also, I suspect, as an effort to remove himself from the squalid concerns of Neo-Realism). There are however, some shots that are memorable and identifiable such as the opening sequence with helicopters flying an enormous statue of Christ over some ruins, the city, and finally to the Vatican. And then there is the iconic scene of two main characters in the Trevi Fountain (you can't get much more Roman than that) in the middle of the night. So all is not lost.

A loose narrative follows Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a photojournalist, through the celebrity and jet-set littered landscape of mod-era Rome. Often at his side is a photographer named Paparazzo, ready to snap pictures of celebrity fights and trysts. With this character, Fellini actually (and inadvertently) invented the term “paparazzi” to mean annoying and intrusive photographers.

We follow Marcello from the glamorous Via Veneto, to his stifling relationship with the suicidal Emma, to his affair with wealthy, world-weary Maddalena, to his flirtation with international sex symbol and actress Sylvia. Along the way, he realizes his life is not what he intended it to be. Longing for the life of a genuine writer and not a gossip columnist for newspapers, he sees the decadence and futility of the slick, glittery life surrounding him, but is unable to escape its pull. Along the way we encounter some truly magical episodes and imagery such as a sad clown in a nightclub being followed by a herd of balloons, two children literally leading a huge crowd of pilgrims on a wild goose chase around a field as they pretend to see an apparition of the Madonna, and a party of aristocrats in tuxedoes and Balenciaga gowns hunting ghosts in a dilapidated villa. At the end of our time with Marcello, we see that he has devolved into a bitter, cruel and helpless man. Like the dead sea monster the party-goers find on the beach at dawn in the final scene of the film, he is dead inside, bloated and useless, unable to communicate.

Recommend? YES! It is a classic film with iconic imagery and plays a huge role in the history of cinema. SEE IT!