Ah, The Sweet Life-Frederico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960)  

DVD Review



By Sam Lowell



La Dolce Vita, Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, and a cast of unforgettable characters, directed by the legendary film director Frederico Fellini, 1960  



Some of the great classic films like Humphrey Bogart’s The Maltese Falcon and Robert Mitchum’s Out Of The Past are driven by their tough guy plotline and so recent viewings of those films left me with the same or maybe slightly stronger admiration for the nuances of their performances. Left me feeling I had made the right original estimation of their characters, had been right in the noir night about their creators’ choices of persona, and of directors’ choices of actors to fill the roles.  Not so the film under review which on first viewing I kind of dismissed out of hand, Frederico Fellini’s world cinema classic La Dolce Vita also recently re-viewed where the late Marcello Mastroianni played the role of the journalist/publicist/writer/playboy Marcello Rubini in search, well, in search of something (or in his more nihilistic moments in search of nothing but the moment).              



Of course when the film first came out in 1960 I was far too young to go to the movie theater and see the production. Moreover even if I had been old enough to attend I would have been warned off the film by Father Lally, the rector of Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in the town I grew up in, as a prime example of the decadence of certain films, certain foreign films which dealt with s-x, homos-xuality, s-xual allure, s-xual depravity and the general downside of the universal moral code in the post-war world got mad.  And I would good Catholic boy that I was then would have obeyed. Although having friends, good Protestant friends, who were a little older who actually saw the film and who took away from it an overestimation of its sexual scenes I had an intense curiosity about the film. About the sexual cavorting aspects (the scene of Marcello and his lady making love, not seen on screen, in some hooker’s apartment, boffing some artist, the orgy in the last scene with some high society woman doing a “strip-tease,” and so on. Stuff young guys would think about in their more vivid imagination moments and that other guys would make sure they recounted, okay).                 

A few years later when I did see the film for the first time I took away that same estimation about the subject matter at hand, sex, the night time is the right time nightlife, life among the jet set of Italy (or from the look of the planes in the film “the propeller set”) in the post-World War II Italy period. Liked the film for its portrayal of the decadent night life, liked the strange ways that this crowd spent it time and the willingness to “live fast, die young, and make a good death” in the time of the worldwide red scare Cold war night where the vast bulk of humankind was being held hostage to the trigger-happiness of distant ghost-like figures. Liked Marcello as a cool, max daddy role model who hung around with good-looking women who seemed ready, more than ready to indulge his sexual wishes, hung around with an odd assortment of characters who were living for the moment, a sentiment I very much wanted to share. I even took to imitating the “shrug” featured in the film by many characters including Marcello when asked a question about anything not of the moment (or maybe of more than the moment but that was the response in the time of the world-wide shrug).  See, I was at least partially trying to live out that same idea in the free fall 1960s.



So I was then less interested, much less interested, in some of the themes Fellini was trying to get across on the screen, especially in the free form portrayal of the wayward Marcello. Had treated Marcello like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe as a cool character. So missed or ignored themes like the tension between Marcello’s job as a low threshold scandal sheet reporter and his literary intellectual ambitions, the tension between his desire for some kind of serious monogamous relationship with a woman and his endlessly and constantly “playing the field,” the tension between the seemingly frivolous lifestyle chooses of the glitterati that he hung out with in Italy and his desires for relevance. Maybe that reflects a certain aging/maturation process on my part (although I still though Anita Ekberg’s role as the American actress Sylvia dancing and cavorting was a highlight of the film as “eye candy” entertainment as much as I did as a young man) that saw Marcello as a guy who was between a rock and a hard place in trying to make his way in the world.



Like a lot of guys, guys like me, gals too, Marcello took the wrong road, wrong road for him when late in the film he, older then, was still hanging around with the jet set, with the decadents, and had made his peace with that decision. The ending of the film was a perfect expression of that decision, set that decision in immortal stone, as he and some others who were attending an all-night orgy went down to the seashore to see some dead sea monster dragged out of the ocean from a fisherman’s net. Down the shoreline he saw a young waitress he had met previously, several years before when he had been making a last ditch effort to become a literary light. As they tried to communicate and couldn’t due to the sound of our mother the sea drowning them out he gave her a perfect “shrug-off” as he walked back to join his fellow partyers. Beautiful finish, the essential existential moment. One of my top ten favorite films of all time.