Originally published March 2, 2022. Updated December 10, 2022.
La Dolce Vita, 1960.
Directed by Federico Fellini.
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Magali Noël, Lex Barker, Jacques Sernas, and Nadia Gray.
SYNOPSIS:
Paramount continues its string of classic reissues with Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita on Blu-ray. The platter serves up the film based on a delicious 4K restoration. Unfortunately, there’s only one bonus item: a 2.5-minute introduction by Martin Scorsese. It’s still a worthwhile pick-up if you’re a fan, or even if, like me, you’re a film buff who has actually never seen this one.
One of the favorite games film fans like to play on social media is “Confess a classic movie that you’ve never seen.” Given the industry’s voluminous output over the past 100-plus years, even the most ardent film buff likely has at least one classic they’ve never seen.
In my case, I probably have several I could confess to, but one of the biggest omissions in my film-viewing experiences has been Federico Fellini’s classic, La Dolce Vita. Released in 1960, it was an instant hit among foreign movie fans in the United States, people like famed director Martin Scorsese, who provided a new introduction for this film’s latest Blu-ray edition.
La Dolce Vita centers on Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a journalist who writes for gossip magazines, as he pursues “the sweet life” in Rome. He has a girlfriend, but he’s a womanizer, which is perfect for his profession. His casual attitudes toward the opposite sex play out from the opening scene, in which a helicopter flies a statue of Jesus past some ruins on its way to a new home. Marcello is along to document the moment, and he has the helicopter pilot hover over some sunbathing women in bikinis so he can flirt with them and ask, unsuccessfully, for their phone number.
Later, he’s part of the mob of journalists and photographers anxiously awaiting the arrival of the beautiful Swedish actress Sylvia Rank (Anita Ekberg), who’s as prone to flights of fancy as he is. He follows her like a stray puppy, only to move on to his next infatuation. And his next one. But by the end, he has come to question whether the sweet life truly is sweet, and if there might be more for him than to indulge in fanciful dalliances that leave a bitter taste in his mouth.
The film’s story is structured as a series of episodes that presumably take place over the course of nine days, including an epilogue. Like many classic films of its era, La Dolce Vita ends on an ambiguous note. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I say that it’s not clear the events of those nine days impart any kind of lasting meaning to Marcello, but perhaps that’s the point that Fellini wanted to leave us with: it’s up to us to decide for ourselves what the sweet life should be, not have the definition handed to us by someone else.
Some modern day viewers might also think Fellini’s depiction of the vapid life of tabloid journalism and paparazzi (La Dolce Vita actually coined that term by having one of the photographers named Paparazzo) was prescient, but the reality is that the movie simply lays bare an aspect of humans that persists today. And it will probably persist for many years more, because famous people will always exist, some form of media will always exist to feed off them, and plenty of “regular people” will always be around to consume said media. That’s simply the way of the world, and it’s as much true today as it was in 1960.
It’s a shame that Scorsese’s introduction, while enlightening, is the only bonus feature on this disc. Criterion issued the film with a big batch of bonus features several years ago, but Paramount must have decided it was too cost-prohibitive to port them over, or perhaps they didn’t try. That said, the ability to own a beautiful presentation of a classic movie at a budget price should be enough to get plenty of film fans to snap it up.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
