Marcello Mastroianni in the final scene of Fellini's masterpiece.
In many ways, La Dolce Vita is a scathing attack on the entertainment industry. That on its own is always welcome, but Fellini goes a step further by taking a humanist perspective; and, in doing so, he makes the effects of commercial media practises all the more tangible. When a swarm of journalists dance around a grieving widow, we are filled more with despair than revulsion. Even the shallow, opportunistic protagonist is given a three-dimensional character, which means that we are capable of pitying, if never really liking, him.
The film consists of a series of vignettes, which are only superficially linked through the presence of the central character (Marcello Mastroianni, in one of his defining performances). A bigger framework, however, is constructed through his interactions, various assignments, volatile relationship with his girlfriend and vapid, endless parties. In one segment, he tries to seduce an international celebrity; in another, he tries to spend time with his estranged father; and in one of the film’s most poignant scenes, he joins a mob of reporters at the site of a supposed miracle. That particular sequence, mostly played as Buñuelian comedy, achieves a kind of religious significance when rain begins bucketing down like some kind of celestial wrath. The ‘miracle’ may well be ridiculous, but the devotion of the locals isn’t; and as such, the parasitic media presence becomes a vulgar and sacrilegious attack on god and humanity.
The film’s penultimate sequence, a party overflowing with ennui-driven excess, is perhaps more depressing than satisfying, but it is essential to set up the brilliant finale, in which the protagonist stumbles down the beach to observe a monstrous oddity. In the distance, a young female acquaintance, representative of a happier, simpler way of life, beckons to him. He cannot hear her words, so shrugs and returns to his intoxicated, spiritually barren entourage. Some might recoil at the blatancy of the metaphors in the final scene, but they are both appropriate and succinct. The title of the film (in English, ‘The Sweet Life’), at first seemingly self-evident, becomes inverted: any sweetness that this empty lifestyle might possess is shown to be superficial, brief and destructive. Far from being reactionary, this is an extraordinarily relevant conclusion. La Dolce Vita is less a relic of a previous time than a very contemporary reflection on modern Western society and its celebrity-obsessed media – a noxious force that, 50 years on, shows no sign of capitulation.
Directed by Federico Fellini
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg
RATING:
★ ★ ★ ★ ½
