DVD Review: La Dolce Vita

DVD cover of La Dolce Vita

La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), as ironic a title as has ever been used in motion picture history, Federico Fellini’s 1960 film commentary on modern hedonism and anomy, and filmed in 1959 in Rome, may just be the best film in his canon, for it combines the Neo-Realism of earlier classics like La Strada and Nights Of Cabiria, while admixing some of the surreal touches of his later classics. Plus, it is the best written and most ambitious of his films.

In many ways, its lead star, Marcello Mastroianni, would play a similar version of this film’s lead character, gossip journalist Marcello Rubini, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (The Night), which followed the travails of a marriage over a single night. While this film does not follow a marriage, it does follow Marcello’s personal travails over the course of a week full of nights and early mornings- although not necessarily in that order. Otherwise it may have been better titled La Settimana (The Week), or La Vuoto Vita (The Empty Life).

  This film is often coupled with its immediate successor film, 8½, and usually compared to negatively by most critics. It’s the superior film, however, because, despite being even a bit longer, at just about five minutes short of three full hours, there is not any of the fat that could be trimmed from 8½. The later film is also a more personalized Fellini romp, and while some scenes may have biographical import to Fellini and film scholars, they do not work in service to the narrative within that film. La Dolce Vita, however, has no such fat, and, indeed, could have gone on a bit longer without feeling the least bit tedious, for Fellini employs the same picaresque narrative techniques he did in earlier films. In essence, instead of one long nearly three hour film the viewer is watching a series of seven or so twenty to thirty minute long short films with just one recurring character.

  The film follows the traipsings of Marcello about the celebrity-ridden Via Veneto, and also amongst the equally soulless idle rich, dull suburbanites, and intellectually effete. It starts with a famed aerial shot of a plaster statue of Jesus being whisked by a helicopter carrying Marcello over Rome. Many episodes of love, death, violence, despair, and longing follow. After the death of a friend, Marcello retreats to a beach house with a group of young hedonists- many openly gay, and goes viciously wild. He debases several women, and he and the others are all turned out of the house by dawn and head to the beach where a dead ‘sea monster’ has been caught. It’s really a huge manta ray with piercing eyes that do not shut. It’s a symbol of both Christianity and monstrous evil that will not leave Marcello. It’s large, ever observing, but dead within. He wanders off and sees a little girl he knows, waving to him from across a small inlet. He cannot hear her and walks away, unable to be seduced by her Siren Song of innocence. He is beyond communication and the reach of such things, after Steiner’s death, and does not care. Perhaps it was Steiner’s death that was the final straw, or his father’s rejection, or Maddalena’s prank at the fountain, or Emma’s smothering, or his own internal loss of self for reasons undisclosed. Marcello is likely to drift to the loneliness that awaits him. The film ends with Paola looking straight at the audience and camera. She is the viewer’s surrogate, and one can only guess at what her eyes will see in the future.

  As for Marcello? He is emotionally impotent, if not sexually, he romanticizes love yet runs from it. He seeks insight, but consorts with phonies. He desires fame, yet settles for empty celebrities. Just as La Strada ends with Zampano defeated on a beach, La Dolce Vita ends with Marcello defeated on a beach. The difference is Zampano cares- for what we cannot know, while Marcello doesn’t. He is beyond such things. Whether one of their attitudes is better than the other is up for debate. Did Marcello really have potential, as Steiner suggests, or was he just a glittering pearl- shiny, but with just an ugly stone at his core?

  The film’s screenplay, written by Fellini with Ennio Flaiano, is impressive, not just for its written brilliance, but for the boundaries it pushed open for film as an art form. Nino Rota, as usual, provides a superb musical score. Perhaps only the Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann pairing equals the contributions of Fellini and Rota in creating memorable film scores. The art direction by Piero Gherardi, and cinematography by Otello Martelli, are all top notch, as well. The acting is first rate. Marcello Mastroianni went from a second tier Italian film star to an international sensation on the heels of his performance, and Anita Ekberg became one of the top pinup girls of the 1960s. Granted, her acting is not much, but the other females in the film are top notch, and all the supporting cast do well- especially Alain Cluny as Steiner and Annibale Ninchi as Marcello’s father. Thankfully, the film’s original producer, Dino de Laurentiis, didn’t get his way and force Paul Newman into the lead role, for Mastroianni has a facile quality that the steely glare of Newman could never convey.

  The two disk DVD, put out by Koch Lorber, is as good as the best work done by The Criterion Collection, and wisely, they’ve bettered their rivals with highly readable golden subtitles that stand out well against the black and white film, something that The Criterion Collection fails to do. Since the film is in multiple languages- Italian, English, French, a dubbed track would be superfluous this time. The restoration job is spectacular- as one of the extras on Disk Two show. The rest are brief and self-congratulatory- some tv commercials Fellini did, some stuff about Fellini’s studio, and badly edited interviews with Ekberg- bloated as a house, and Mastroianni, old and haggard. The film on Disk One is also introduced by Alexander Payne, and has a commentary by film critic and historian Richard Schickel. As usual, it’s a bad and dull commentary from him. He too often states the obvious, provides little historical insight, and even less into individual scenes. There are inexplicable three or four minute pauses at key moments in the film, and while he’s not rotely reading a lecture, one gets the sense that this was just a job for him, not a labor of love.
 

Some believe that the seven days and nights of the film correspond to the seven hills of Rome or the Seven Deadly Sins. That is not really of import, for great art is never so easily and simply parsed. Whatever the reality is, the fact is that there’s never been a better film about the anomy of the human condition- and it’s not just modernity under scrutiny, for clearly Fellini shows that the pilgrims at the Madonna sighting, are as lost as any of the modern glitterati, thus implying it is endemic to the human condition, and reflected in the very picaresque structure of the film. La Dolce Vita is one of the great works of art by one of the greatest artists of the last century, and in that statement, there’s not a hint of irony.

Read a full review here.