All Too Real
Fellini's La Dolce Vita is as genuine as anything else that emerged from Italy's neo-realist movement of the '50s
by Noel Murray
The dirty secret of Italian neo-realism is that it was never all that real. Filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica used nonprofessional actors and real locations, but they weren't making documentaries. De Sica planned his shots as meticulously as Hitchcock and used sentimental music to play on the audience's sympathy for the downtrodden. So when world cinema historians point to Federico Fellini's 1960 epic of decadence La Dolce Vita as the death-knell for neo-realism, they're not making a statement about the filmmaking so much, but the subject matter. The presumption is that venal celebrities and bored socialites aren't "real."
Style-wise, Fellini's 1963 follow-up 8 1/2 is the real break from the neo-realist tradition. La Dolce Vita itself is more a culmination of the early work of Gillo Pontecorvo, Luchino Visconti, De Sica and Rossellini (the last of whom Fellini worked with as a screenwriter). It's an episodic melodrama full of conventional gags and plot twists—a sprawling slice of life that indicts the Italian upper class of the '50s as they tumbled into the '60s. In his new memoir Chronicles, Bob Dylan describes seeing La Dolce Vita and writes, "It looked like life in a carnival mirror except it didn't show any monster freaks—just regular people in a freaky way." Dylan's half-right. The film may be weird, disjointed and packed with symbolism, but it's far from avant-garde. There's a reason why La Dolce Vita became a sensation when it hit American theaters, and why its influence could be felt in subsequent dopey Hollywood films like Gidget Goes to Rome (with its Fellini-esque parties) and A Guide for the Married Man (with its sexually frustrated suburbanites looking for a worry-free kick).
La Dolce Vita stars Marcello Mastroianni as a cynical journalist named Marcello, who writes gossipy personality profiles. The film takes place over seven long, revelatory nights, as Marcello spends an evening with his mistress, chases a movie star, goes to a party thrown by bored intellectuals, visits a country villa where the idle rich dabble in spiritualism, and ultimately plays ringleader to a night of furious, forced decadence.
Fellini packs La Dolce Vita with unforgettable images, from the flying statue of Jesus that opens the film to the sight of cartoonishly curvaceous Anita Ekberg splashing around in the Trevi Fountain. But what got audiences talking 45 years ago and still starts arguments today is what Fellini means to say, if anything. In our post-reality era, the movie seems to be commenting on the flimsiness of fame in a world where just being next to a celebrity is tantamount to glory. But how Marcello feels about his lot and what he wants out of life remain elusive throughout—though a scene where he sits at a seaside cafe with a typewriter and fails to write a word hints that what he really wants to do is absolutely nothing. Some viewers are still irritated by the hero's arrogant indifference, considering it a mirror of Fellini's attitude. But like the work of Woody Allen—a Fellini fanboy—Fellini's films are open enough to be seen as self-critical. Roger Ebert has written about seeing La Dolce Vita multiple times throughout his life and finding his opinion of the hero changing as he gets older: from admiration to sympathy to anger to pity.
Myself, I've been slow to come around to Fellini because I was initially turned off by 8 1/2, which I found unbearably coy and pretentious. Recently I've caught up with the underrated city-poem Fellini's Roma and Criterion's magnificent DVD of I Vitelloni, a clear forerunner to American Graffiti, Mean Streets and Diner. La Dolce Vita has a lot in common with those two movies, in its idealized vision of Rome as a center of classical greatness corrupted by small-minded moderns and its obsession with the hidden corridors of power. The people in Fellini films don't have the aestheticized cool of the typical European arthouse character—they talk with springy Italian accents and gesture broadly, living with a casually carnal intensity. La Dolce Vita's parade of demonic party animals and bored provocateurs seems surreal, but though much about the movie is staged and exaggerated, very little is falsified. If it seems too rich to be neo-realism, it's only because it's hard to believe that something so boisterous and dazzling was made by man.
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