What more can be said or written about Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita‘? I included watching this film in the program of an anniversary day and I did not regret a single moment. 66 years after its release and the Palme D’Or it received at Cannes, this film remains one of the most important cinematic experiences I have had in my life of a passionate cinephile. It is a film that tells a lot about Italy after World War II, about Italian cinema and about Federico Fellini as one of the most important Italian filmmakers and in the history of this art. It is a film full of love for Rome, but it is also a story and a character that transcend the limits of time and place where it was filmed and that will remain, I believe, interesting and relevant whenever this film will be seen in the future. It is the film that built the image of Marcello Mastroianni and that introduced the common noun paparazzi into the languages of the world. A masterpiece.
With its almost three hours of screening, ‘La Dolce Vita‘ predicts the trend of long films in Hollywood today. The main character goes through episodes of epicurean searches alternating with disappointments, feelings of failure and phases of boredom, but at no time are the latter transmitted to the audience. In this sense, the comparison between Fellini‘s films and those of his colleague of the generation and respected rival, Michelangelo Antonioni, is interesting. The heroes of ‘La Dolce Vita’ belong to the same world as those of Antonioni’s films. The latter focused on the inner lives of the characters, while Fellini starts from the same point to build his own world, in which reality is reconstructed as a dream. The most quoted and photographed episodes of the film are concentrated in its first part, but everything that follows is significant, loaded with visual metaphors, fascinating and exuberant. Fellini absorbs his viewers into his universe.
The actors in ‘La Dolce Vita’ melt into their roles, to the point of erasing the differences between themselves and the characters. Marcello Mastroianni took the main features from the character Marcello and repeated them with variations in many of the great roles that followed in his career. Anita Ekberg almost totally crossed the ocean after this film, featuring mainly in European productions and becoming Fellini‘s muse (or one of the muses) in several of the films that followed. Anouk Aimée built the profile of other hot characters under an apparently icy shell starting from her character Maddalena in this film. Finally, Alain Cuny, a French actor with an unjustly forgotten career today, created the prototype of the intellectual who hides his inner storms (perhaps also his corruption), imitated by himself and others in many other films.
‘La Dolce Vita‘ also has several episodes that reflect the complex relationship that Fellini had with faith and the Catholic church. Without being a practitioner, he was rather a critical and lucid believer. The scenes that recount a mass hysteria produced by a ‘vision’ experienced by two children on the outskirts of Rome have a contemporary resonance, they could also be extracted from our immediate reality. What attracted the attention of viewers and critics, however, were the two scenes that open and close the film, scenes that have explicit biblical references. I find it intriguing that it was precisely these scenes that attracted criticism from religious institutions upon the film’s release and for many years afterwards. To me, the metaphor of the statue of Jesus hovering hanging from a helicopter above the Eternal City seems to be a philosophical critique of a world that ignores traditional values. The automatic reactions of censorship were wrong again. Fellini‘s perspective was not only artistic but also deeply moral.