Great
Italian director Frederico Fellini’s La
Dolce Vita (1960) chronicles the fast-paced, seductive life of the Roman
cosmopolitan world and all its excesses, capturing a moment in time when
notions of glamor, empty entertainment and the promise of a quick thrill seemed
poised to replace all humanizing values, and dignity was transmuted into the
sensational. For Fellini, the film marks a turning point, a shift away from his
neorealist roots as a writer for Rossellini’s Open City (1945) and Paisa
(1946), and his own earlier films like I
Vitteloni (1953), La Strada
(1954), and The Nights of Cabiria
(1957). The director’s movies became more stylized, more poetic, finally giving
way to the visual carnival of 8½ (1963),
Juliet of the Spirits (1965), and Amarcord (1973). His images are highly
charged with contrasts, textures, and movements and filled with longing and
regret, even despair, but there is always a sense of joy, of wonder, a pure
expression of love for his characters, their stories, and cinema. La Dolce Vita is not a film, it’s an
experience. Following Marcello, a young journalist on the make (played by
Marcello Mastroiani in the first of a series of collaborations with Fellini) as
he chases down stories and women, the movie is a loose series of episodes,
nights and dawns, ascents and descents weaved together in the decadent rhythm
of an endless, aimless search for the elusive sweet life of Rome’s upper class.
