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Savoring Fellini's "sweet life" cinema
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
To listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of La Dolce Vita, conducted earlier this month, click here. To hear the latest Cineversary podcast episode celebrating the 65th anniversary of La Dolce Vita, click here.
La Dolce Vita still resonates 65 years later because it remains a fascinating cultural artifact of a particular place and time: Late 1950s Rome. It contains several visually arresting vignettes and set pieces that take us throughout the city and across different classes, subcultures, and sites – taking us along the journey to several iconic Roman locations, including the Trevi Fountain; Via Veneto; St. Peter’s Basilica; the Baths of Caracalla; Castel Sant’Angelo; the EUR District; and Piazza del Popolo.
“Always a master of the grand tableau, Fellini captures Rome in staggering breadth, from the opening aerial shots of the city, the narrow streets, prostitutes' bedrooms through to aristocratic homes and around the historic landmarks on the back of a Vespa. He's like a tireless, voluble tour guide; you're never quite sure where he's going but you're compelled to follow,” Guardian critic Steve Rose assessed.
The film visually showcases what was called the Italian economic miracle, occurring from roughly 1958 to 1963, when the country experienced rapid industrial growth, transforming from an agrarian society into a major economic power, and living standards were improved. This gave rise to two particular movements: "café society" in Italy and Europe, represented by groups of fashionable and wealthy people who gathered in stylish cafes, restaurants, and nightclubs to socialize and engage in artistic and intellectual conversations; and celebrity culture, in which famous actors, models, athletes, and personalities become glamorized and overexposed through an increasingly shameless, debased media that satiate the public’s voracious appetite for glitz, gossip, scandal, and sex appeal, spread lies, and stage exaggerated or fake events.
This work has stood the test of time thanks to the efforts of an adventurous filmmaker who wasn’t afraid to deviate from traditional narrative construction and, to some extent, rewrite the form—which keeps this picture feeling fresh and innovative. Instead of following a standard three-act structure and straightforward plot, Fellini presents interrelated but not necessarily linear vignettes (consisting of 50 total scenes), each spanning 14 to 30 minutes, that follow his main character over roughly 7 days and nights, with each episode including or prefacing a nocturnal adventure and/or the dawn that follows it. Along this journey, the director discards the rules of conflict and closure, continuity, and redemptive characteristics that can make a protagonist sympathetic – although there is still a traceable character arc if you follow Marcello’s journey.
Ponder how Fellini constantly surprises us with unexpected transitions, juxtaposed images, and ellipses between scenes. Recall the opening helicopter sequence, which immediately shifts to a medium close-up of a nightclub dancer clad in a Far East mask and garb; Marcello running into a church (a place we least expect him to visit); the abrupt swing from the dreamlike romance of the Trevi Fountain to harsh sunup reality as Sylvia’s fiancé slaps her and punches Marcello; the lavish revelry that cuts to Marcello wandering Rome’s empty streets; the lively party transitioning quickly to the grim discovery of Steiner’s suicide and filicide; and the debauched orgy that moves outdoors to the beach at quiet dawn.
“(Fellini’s) best films live and breathe and morph, none more so than the picaresque La dolce vita, which may be his most nearly perfect, astutely rueful, least sentimental work,” per Criterion Collection essayist Gary Giddens. “One of the most prescient of all films, it now triggers a different set of keywords than it did in the early 1960s…After a dozen years of neorealism, which cataloged the privations of postwar Italy, Fellini reinvented Rome as a caravan of dreams or nightmares, debauched, pathetic, yet perfidiously appealing, a tourist attraction and also a recruitment station for the inferno.”
La Dolce Vita also still matters because it continues to be a cerebral experience. It requires more active participation from the viewer and, therefore, rewards those who ponder more intellectually about what Fellini and company are trying to say. Thematically rich and creatively constructed, it’s a thinking person’s picture, although more passive viewers can still find it entertaining and graphically gratifying even if they’re not exactly sure how all the Marcello episodes fit together.
The film’s influential reach is impressive. Consider how it was responsible for originating three words or phrases that took root in the cultural consciousness, including the “paparazzi,” “Felliniesque,” and “la dolce vita” itself (which means “the sweet life”). The movie also made Marcello Mastroianni an international star and Fellini’s most frequently used actor from that point forward. In his thought-provoking essay, Giddens provides ample examples of the film’s pervasive reach and lasting impact in the short and long term: “(La Dolce Vita) augurs our obsessions with the loss of privacy and the rise of virtuality, the deadening of the senses and the addiction to technology, the corruption of media, the lust for fame, and the waning of lust when acculturation trumps individual agency. La dolce vita altered the look, style, and expanse of movies, popularizing overdressed Euro-chic ennui, deflating the pneumatic concupiscence of bombshell film queens, urbanizing the garden of earthly delights, and setting them to warped cabaret music. Movies were soon rife with Americans spending two weeks in another town, usually Rome. Alfred Hitchcock appropriated the sequence of Anita Ekberg wading in Trevi Fountain as backstory for The Birds. Bob Dylan rhymed La dolce vita and Rita in Motorpsycho Nightmare.”
Of course, Fellini’s own 8 ½ (1963) shares visual and thematic elements and also stars Mastroianni. Other cinematic kindred spirits include La Notte (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962), I Knew Her Well (1965), Woody Allen’s Celebrity (1998) and To Rome With Love (2012), and even Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), as blogger Jenna Ipcar demonstrates an interesting essay. The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza, 2013), about an aging writer encountering high society decadence in Rome, is regarded as a more contemporary La Dolce Vita.
Literary and cinematic predecessors that might have inspired La Dolce Vita include Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320), T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Billy Wilder’s film Ace in the Hole (1951), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche (1955) and Il Grido (1957), and Luchino Visconti’s White Nights (1957).
Fellini is clearly taking aim here at moral vacuity and ennui in an increasingly vapid culture and self-indulgent society. La Dolce Vita hints at the dangers of decadence, hedonism, celebrity culture, lack of empathy, and ethical indifference in an increasingly secular world that values immediate gratification. Slant magazine reviewer Matthew Connolly sums it up well: “Fellini’s coolly damning masterpiece observes a vast array of celebrities, scenesters, performers, artists, dilettantes, would-be intellectuals, and hangers-on of all shapes and sizes—every one of them fiddling while Rome burns, or at least creaks under the weight of its own spiritual malaise.”
The existential conflict at the center of the story is hard to miss. Our protagonist must choose between indulgence versus integrity, style versus substance, and short-term gains versus long-term fulfillment. Marcello is torn between the pleasure principled sweet life of tabloid journalism and its decadent perks, or less glamorous literary and intellectual pursuits as a serious writer. He vacillates between disposable partners who offer pleasurable but fleeting and meaningless sexual flings and a relationship with his fiancée who can love him for a lifetime but who crimps his lifestyle and ambitions with her clinginess and jealousy. Recall how Steiner’s friend Laura tells Marcello “…you have two loves, and you don't know which one to choose: journalism or literature. Beware of prisons! Remain free, available, like me. Never marry anything. Never choose. Even in love, it's better to be chosen. The great thing is to burn, and not to freeze.” We remember Marcello’s remark: “I need a change of scene…I’m wasting my life.”
Ruminate on how Marcello is often shown ascending or descending levels via staircases, scaffolding, and a helicopter. These upward movements – including his stair climb up Saint Peter’s dome, Marcello’s ascent to Steiner’s high-rise apartment, and his elevation to the loft where Steiner plays the organ possibly suggest a moral uplifting or his attempts to attain a higher ideal. Downward movements – going down into the crypt, the prostitute’s home, or the underground nightclubs – signify falls from grace and a lowering of standards.
La Dolce Vita is also a film about frustration, centered on sexual, career, and relationship disappointments and dissatisfaction. Time and again, Marcello (and his father in a later scene) is thwarted from kissing or coupling with an object of desire, greeting yet another new dawn without fulfillment, release, or epiphany. After Steiner’s fall from grace in his eyes, Marcello apparently drops any hopes of pursuing serious writing, abandoning journalism altogether to become an even less respectable press agent. He has become a hollow, pathetic figure of self-loathing. Critic Roger Ebert called this film “an allegory – a cautionary tale of a man without a center.”
Irony and hypocrisy abound in this Fellini creation, as well. Ponder how Marcello often tries to evade the media spotlight when it shines on him, yet he’s a card-carrying member of that club; we observe his friend Paparazzo cross himself religiously before taking a photo for his tabloid rag during the “field of miracles” segment; Marcello and Emma constantly fight and break up, only to quickly reunite; Emma realizes that the children’s claim to have seen the Madonna is a sham yet still prays for Marcello’s affection, joining the crowd in tearing apart the nearby tree for precious pieces of its branches; Marcello lionizes Steiner and seeks to emulate this mentor but is completely disillusioned when Steiner kills himself and his children; Maddalena says she’s in love with Marcello and hints at marriage but a moment later is seen lustfully kissing a stranger.
Time and again La Dolce Vita juxtaposes two polarities – the sacred versus the profane – with memorable images and contrasting ideas. Examples include the two symbols of Christ that open and close the film (the Jesus statue versus the washed-up sea creature); the statue imagery – comedically insinuating the Messiah’s second coming in a sacrilegious way, according to the Catholic Church – followed closely by visions of bikini-clad beauties and sensationalistic journalists; the visibly present “perfect woman”, embodied in Silvia, contrasting with another idealized but invisible female, the Virgin Mary; the carnivalesque media circus that is created on a would-be sanctified site; and the hallowed organ music played from the church as opposed to the secular pop tunes emanating from the nightclubs or, as I like to call it “Bach vs. Bacchus,” the Roman god of wine and revelry.
Some viewers struggle to interpret the ending of the film. Here’s one reading: The dead aquatic animal – perhaps a manta ray – washed up on the beach can be loosely deciphered as a symbol of a dead Christ (Jesus is often associated with fish and Piscean imagery); recall how the fishermen say the animal had been dead for three days, the length of time Christ was deceased before being resurrected. Remember how the film opens with the striking imagery of a gigantic Jesus statue being helicoptered across Rome; this dead fish visual then serves as a spiritual-shifting-to-secular bookend to the narrative – Marcello’s story as well as Italy’s story through the eyes of Fellini.
The waitress Paola is present in this scene for thematic reasons and to remind Marcello of their first encounter at the cafe, when he was attempting to be a serious writer; however, he doesn’t recognize or hear her, which intimates that he has completely forgotten that ambition or talent and is deaf to a higher calling. Remember how, at the opening of the film, Marcello – aloft in a helicopter – experienced a similar problem hearing and communicating with the rooftop sunbathers.
The breaking of the fourth wall, with Paola turning to stare directly at us, continued a recent European and French new wave tradition in which characters in films by Bergman (Summer With Monika, 1953), Truffaut (The 400 Blows, 1959, which famously ends with a still frame of the protagonist looking at the camera), and Godard (Breathless, 1960) do the same. A similar shot occurs earlier in La Dolce Vita, when Steiner and his wife briefly stare into the camera (which is not necessarily a POV shot from Marcello’s perspective). The image of Paola – a relatively insignificant character who functions more as a symbol of purity, innocence, and simplicity – looking directly into our eyes implies that she’s also looking directly at Marcello, and vice versa; her semi-smiling visage, with a face described earlier by Marcello as angelic, gives Marcello and the audience hope that he can choose a more virtuous path in the future if he wants it.
This movie’s most valuable largesse to the masses who continue to flock to the shrine of Fellini is its ability to both entertain and illuminate, to completely capture our attention with its loose episodic structure yet also provide a moral message without any sermonizing as well as a fairly clear – if frustrating – character arc in the form of Marcello, a man torn between two modes of living who ultimately chooses the easier path: the “sweet life” of this film’s title. The multiple vignettes serve as short films within the film and would make fascinating feature-length narratives of their own if expanded upon.
Yet, collectively, they’re greater than the sum of their parts because each episode contributes to the overall mosaic that is Marcello, a figure who’s more than a conflicted journalist pulled in two opposing directions; he represents Italy itself at a crossroads moment in its history when the traditions and beliefs of the past were being supplanted or challenged by contemporary ideas and trends that seemed to value vice over virtue, fame and fortune over integrity, commercialism over intellectualism, and profligacy and selfishness over good taste and goodwill. This is a film of ideas that challenges the viewer to think beyond the basic narrative, learn more about the cultural context of this period in Italy’s history, and look for parallels and dichotomies within each of the chapters presented.
