La Dolce Vita (1960)

Italy/France, 174 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Photography: Otello Martelli
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Leo Cattozzo
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noel, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Walter Santesso, Alain Dijon, Nico

I'm starting to feel like this whole thing with Fellini is just not going to work out for me. I do appreciate a handful of his pictures from the '50s, but David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film is there to tell me I'm wrong, warning that those movies need "to be put firmly in [their] place" as "slick, mechanical stories, feeding on superficial feelings and uncritical of sentimentality or grand effects." (They include I Vitelloni, La Strada, Il Bidone, and Le notti di Cabiria, the latter of which is one of my all-time favorites, although I believe I am coming to understand better all the time that that is probably more a matter of its lead player Giulietta Masina than her husband Fellini.)

On the other hand, La Dolce Vita and 8½ both occupy the top 25 of the critical consensus list of the best films of all time at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (currently #25 and #6 respectively). For me, they are both overlong exercises in overweening indulgence that only occasionally redeem themselves with arresting sequences (the majority of which involve music) and momentary diversions of intriguing images. I'll go with the critics to the extent that 8½ is the better of the two—in fairness, Thomson is nearly as dubious about La Dolce Vita as he is of the '50s films—but I think I may be about done with the enterprise now.

A recent pass through the epic 1960 meditation on media fatuities that is La Dolce Vita pretty much confirmed my impatience with it. I thought (hoped) I might like it better a second time through, but no. It's way too long, there is little of narrative interest and what there is tends to be overplayed and out of balance, and its various insights are obvious—I suspect they were obvious even for the time, though a part of me wants to credit it with prescience for seeing ahead so accurately to the current malignant excesses of journalism, particularly in the contexts of the fashionable and glamorous wealthy. (Or make that just "the wealthy," but that's a subject for another place and time, and less to do generally with the movies.)

Mastroianni, who acquits himself well in 8½ and elsewhere here seems to me mostly wasted, playing a bumbling journalist who gets by on good looks even as he juggles multiple love affairs with multiple women, some rather chaste, as with a famous Swedish-American actress Sylvia (played by Anita Ekberg), who is in Rome to make a glamorous movie; and others rather committed, as with his ostensible girlfriend, the needy and ultimately shrewish Emma (played by Yvonne Furneaux). Mostly he just stumbles about in a haze of vaguely amiable befuddlement, forever wearily pushing his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose.

Ekberg is at the center of my favorite scene, an exuberant and spontaneous dance that erupts at a nightclub with a crypt-like ambience when Frankie (played by Alain Dijon and his "like my sexy beard?" facial hair and mincing lips), who is a friend of Sylvia's, shows up and directs the band to play a lively version of Perez Prado's "Patricia." The energy of the crowd in the club and of the movie itself picks up considerably in those few minutes when Ekberg kicks off her shoes and throws herself into the dance.

Numerous famous images dot the picture all through, perhaps most famously in the opening scene, which shows a colossal statue of Jesus being ferried via helicopter across Rome. The statue hangs from the chopper as it passes Roman ruins, casts its shadow over postwar housing reconstruction projects and apartment buildings, and looms beatifically across the landscape of the ancient city at large. It's an impressive feat of imagination, though disconnected from everything as much as the very nearly equally impressive image of the beached squid that closes the film, at the end of a party that goes till dawn.

In between there is jaded ennui and enervation enough for all, faux miracles of the Madonna, paparazzi falling all over one another to get the picture, a constant mise en scene of pictures and artifice and filmmaking, endless streams of beautiful fashionable women, any number of spoken languages switching in and out, even a rock 'n' roll band at one point, and always a knowing and ultimately tiresome sophistication.

It's altogether a big swirling mess, hitting on obvious touchstones as if merely to acknowledge and dispose them—religion, hypocrisy, family, etc., etc. Sometimes it strikes me as working well with, perhaps even inventing, a certain kind of '60s moment, with vividly cool debauched people of all stripes celebrating their expensive kinks together, in a kind of posh, tony, never-ending bacchanalia—look over there, it's Nico. But it never seems to find a way to make an actual point about any of that. It could well be the point itself, that is, the enervation runs too deep to bother with a point. Or making a point is such an outdated and obvious way of doing things (darling). But I'm not sure that's not just too easy. In the end I can't escape the feeling that Fellini is expecting me to put more work into it than he did himself.

Scheduling note: I'm taking next week off from movies, and most of the rest of the summer off from this canon project. I've got a list of movies that caught my attention one way or another over the last year or so that I will be working from starting in two weeks. They're alphabetical, so you'll know we've reached the end of them when I get to the letter "U."