La Dolce Vita (1960)

Everybody knows that La Dolce Vita is Fellini’s masterpiece and one of the greatest movies ever made. But is everybody right about that?

This is a movie that has been so lavishly praised that if you don’t like it you can find yourself doubting your own judgment. It must be a great movie - all those critics and film scholars said so.

One thing that can be said for certain is that this is an incredibly depressing nihilistic movie. 

I’m not surprised that Martin Scorsese loves this movie. He saw when it first came out, at the age of 18. And it’s a movie guaranteed to appeal to teenaged aspiring arty intellectuals.

The plot is just a series of incidents in the life of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni). He doesn’t really like to think of himself as a journalist. He’s actually a writer of serious literature. As the film progresses we come to suspect this is merely a cope. He doesn’t actually write serious literature. He just talks about writing it. The reality is that he’s just another sleazebag journalist.

Marcello has a girlfriend, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux). He treats her very badly but it has to be said that she’s irritating and whiny and needy and incredibly emotionally manipulative.

His first encounter in the movie is with sexy glamorous Sylvia  Rank (Anita Ekberg). He tries to get her into bed but fails. Being a movie star she might not have high moral standards but she does have enough self-respect not to sleep with sleazy second-rate journalists.

He’s equally unsuccessful with the aristocratic Maddalena (Anouk Aimée). She flirts with him and plays emotional games with him but she’s not going to lower herself to sleeping with him. That would be like sleeping with the gardener or one of the footmen.

We start to suspect that Marcello is not a very successful philanderer. He only seems to score with women with zero self-respect.

He runs into an old friend named Steiner (Alain Cuny). Steiner is an intellectual. He’s as shallow and empty as all the other characters but he can make misery and self-pity sound impressive.

Marcello also encounter the Roman proto-counterculture - pseudo-arty misfits trying to shock the bourgeoisie.

And he visits the countryside where he finds that the peasants are still living in the mental world of the Middle Ages.

The aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the poor, the counter-culture types, the intellectuals  - all stupid and empty-headed. And the journalists and the paparazzi flocking around the rich and famous are the most corrupt and shallow of all.

This was the era of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s. The economy was booming but Fellini clearly thought that Europe was doomed by rampant materialism and decadence.

La Dolce Vita was considered revolutionary for its lack of interest in any coherent linear narrative. This suited the subject matter - aimless people living in an aimless society, moving fast on a road to nowhere. Unfortunately the movie does not move fast. At almost three hours it is very slow and since every single character is contemptible (either selfish and narcissistic or self-pitying) there’s not much to engage the viewer’s interest. And it’s shot in stark black-and-white. It’s quite an achievement to make one of the world’s most beautiful exciting cities seem ugly and dull but this film manages to do just that. And he makes the picturesque Italian countryside look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Anita Ekberg is the one bright spot. She seems to be enjoying herself and her character, Sylvia, might be shallow but she seems almost alive.

And while he might be satirising the shallow hedonistic decadence of the new Europe and he might have been intending to make the decadence seem tawdry and sordid and they might be valid intentions the fact remains that La Dolce Vita is a bit of a slog. There’s also some heavy-handed symbolism.

At the end of the day you have to wonder if the cinematic journey was really worth it. I can see why people were excited by the movie at the time and it is one of those movies that you have to be able to say you’ve seen but it left me cold.