Federico Fellini 🎬 La Dolce Vita

Roger Ebert
on
Federico Fellini’s

La Dolce Vita

"Movies do not change, 
but their viewers do"

 Roger Ebert: "When I saw La Dolce Vita in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom “the sweet life” represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamor, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman."

When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello’s world; Chicago’s North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello’s age.

When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way.

By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him.

And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died (1996) I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal. 
There may be no such thing as the sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself.”

 

Three Reasons:
La Dolce Vita

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Amitoj Gautam: In La Dolce Vita, Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is a journalist in Rome during the late 1950s who covers tabloid news of movie stars, religious visions and the self-indulgent aristocracy while searching for a more meaningful way of life. 

Depicting the ease, confusion, and frequency with which Marcello is distracted by women, the movie's theme "is predominantly café society, the diverse and glittery world rebuilt upon the ruins and poverty"of the Italian postwar period. 
Based on the most common interpretation of the storyline, the film can be divided into a prologue, seven major episodes interrupted by an intermezzo, and an epilogue. 
If the evenings of each episode were joined with the morning of the respective preceding episode together as a day, they would form seven consecutive days.

In the 2nd Day Sequence, Marcello Mastroianni goes on assignment for the arrival of Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), a famous Swedish-American actress, at Ciampino airport where she is met by a horde of news reporters. 

Later, an infatuated Marcello dances with Sylvia in the Baths of Caracalla. Sylvia's natural sensuality triggers raucous partying while Robert (Lex Barker), her bored fiancé, reads a newspaper. 

His humiliating remark to her causes Sylvia to leave the group, eagerly followed by Marcello and his paparazzi colleagues. Finding themselves alone, Marcello and Sylvia spend the rest of the evening in the alleys of Rome where they wade into the Trevi Fountain.
Amitoj Gautam

Club Caracalla "La Dolce Vita"

This is one of the most enigmatic figures, in a way, in all of Fellini because she tempts, she taunts, she leads people on, she’s full of some kind of slightly spurious joy of living.
Critic and film historian Richard Schickel on Anita Ekberg’s character, Sylvia, in La Dolce Vita (1960)