Ready to Rent Ready to Rent (April 29, 2005)

La Dolce Vita

Koch Lorber Home Video VHS & DVD

3 hrs

Director: Frederico Fellini

Frederico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" is a film of singular transcendence - an experience oft-imitated but never duplicated in its wonder and terror of the (then) modern soul. It is the film that fostered Fellini's career into his later, expressionistic work and earned the 1960 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is also one of Fellini's most accessible and mischievous, deliberately combining the carousel of sacred and profane images into a deft retelling of Dante's "Inferno" channeled through Fellini's own doppelganger Marcello Mastroianni. It is an "Inferno," however, steeped in emptiness, more terrible than God's own justice.

Mastroianni plays Marcello Rubini, a paparazzi journalist whom we first meet circling the Roman sky in a helicopter carrying a statue of Jesus, which he and the pilot use to flirt with some buxom sunbathers on a rooftop. This image is essentially the essence of "La Dolce Vita," both playful and irreverent. Marcello lives from evening to evening, hanging out in clubs, piazzas and parties, looking for the latest gossip; if a story happens to break, the wolf pack of journalists attacks. His associates range from pimps, prostitutes and transvestites to debutantes, royalty, intellectuals and movie stars, all of whom roam the nocturnal celestial spheres of Rome's seven hills and all of whom seem frenzied to connect with anything.

It is in Marcello's seven nights that he encounters these characters, who reflect his own loss of self. The best known is Marcello's shadowing of actress Anita Ekberg's movie starlet "Sylvia" (to whom Anna Nicole Smith bears a dubious resemblance), who takes Marcello out for a night of carrot-dangled sex, only to frustratingly turn into the image of his own stupefied and idolized sense of beauty (it is the film's most subtle joke). The passage that most haunts me, however, is the orgy at the end of the film (due to Marcello's breakdown) and, in its aftermath, the monster that the sea delivers up. It is an incident both terrifying and exhilarating due to Fellini's sense of theatricality (the partygoers' solemn procession to the sea) and cinematographer Otello Martelli's B&W compositions. "La Dolce Vita" is also Fellini's hip styling of Joyce's "Ulysses" with Marcello playing the part of Stephen Dedalus, drifting from one shore to another without a home and, more frighteningly, without a figurehead. His wife is metaphorically dead to him and his idea of women stays within the realm of the physical symbolic - never the real. It is also in this film where Fellini became a personal artist without delving into the pomposity and self-indulgence of his later work. What makes "La Dolce Vita" so vibrant is Fellini's presentation of his characters and, more so, his own personal image. If compassion is divine then Fellini plays the most benevolent among his universe of lowlifes, whom he never romanticizes but always embraces, recognizing the good and bad within us all. -Joe Ramirez

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