Film review

Federico Fellini (1960)

Showing at BFI as part of their Fellini centennial season, La dolce vita was prefaced with an explanation, in Italian, of restoration work done on the original print.  Subtitles for this came and went so quickly they were hard to keep up with.  Perhaps they included a warning that sound and picture would be slightly out of sync – if so, I missed it.  The disharmony was sometimes distracting but not enough to obscure this film’s unique allure.

La dolce vita’s legacy is singular too.  It includes, as well as images, words – in the form of loanwords rather than immortal one-liners.  The title phrase, though common currency in Italy, was absorbed into English in the wake of the film.  Even more unusually, the name of one of its characters has become part of the Anglophone lexicon:  the news photographer whose camera never rests is called Paparazzo.  (Fellini is keen-eyed, or even prophetic, in also showing the photographers getting their camera subjects not only to pose but to pretend.)  The most famous image of La dolce vita, one of the most famous images in any picture, is Anita Ekberg, as a Swedish-American movie star wading through the waters of the Trevi Fountain.  The next most famous image, in the opening sequence, is a statue of Christ suspended by a cable from a helicopter.

Both images are close to the heart of La dolce vita, which illustrates and interrogates high society in a specific time and place – Rome in the late 1950s – but the shots in the first sequence are richer.  There are two helicopters.  The first, bearing the holy cargo, is en route to the Vatican but passes over a city whose architecture bespeaks the secular miracle of the post-war economic boom.  The helicopter following contains two passengers:  Paparazzo (Walter Santesso) sits alongside the journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), who will be the film’s protagonist.  The helicopters first appear above the ruins of a Roman viaduct.  When they reach the metropolis, the aircraft are hailed by a group of construction workers then by four bikini-clad young women, who interrupt their sunbathing on the roof of an apartment block to stand and wave to Marcello.  He comically tries and fails to get the admiring women’s phone numbers.  Fellini creates in short order a concoction of Rome ancient and modern, sacred and profane.

What follows is a series of episodes exploring Marcello’s fruitless attempts to find fulfilment in either his personal or his creative life.   Fellini, who wrote the screenplay with Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli and Brunello Rondi, describes Marcello’s continuing relationships with his resentfully long-standing fiancée Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), the world-weary heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) and his father (Annibale Ninchi); more transient encounters with the visiting screen siren Sylvia (Ekberg) and the teenage waitress Paola (Valeria Ciangottini); and friendship with the intellectual and aesthete Steiner (Alain Cuny).  That friendship, which has survived even though the two men rarely see each other, reflects Marcello’s persisting sense that he should devote himself to the life of the mind – to writing, instead of the tabloid journalism he’s made such a success of, the novel he’s never managed to complete.

In a radio broadcast the transcript of which became one of her best-known published pieces (when it appeared in I Lost It at the Movies), Pauline Kael bracketed La dolce vita, La notte and Last Year at Marienbad as ‘The Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties’ of contemporary arthouse cinema (the Antonioni and Resnais films both appeared the year after La dolce vita).  Although Kael acknowledged that Fellini’s film was ‘very different in directorial style’ from the other two, she saw the characters in all three pictures – members of ‘international café society’ – as ‘set in an atmosphere from which the possibilities of joy, satisfaction, and even simple pleasures are eliminated’, with a party the favoured ‘symbol of the end of the world and the failure of human relations’.

La dolce vita does feature a succession of set-piece social events but their tone and personnel are more various than Kael implies.  The nocturnal partying with forthright hedonist Sylvia at its centre, and her abusive boyfriend (Lex Barker) exuding bored malignity on the margins, is very different from the group of culture vultures chez Steiner – exchanging philosophical aperçus, listening to ethnic music and recordings of nature sounds.  The sleepwalking aristocrats hosting a party at their castle in a village outside Rome are worlds away from the turnout at a Fregene beach-house bacchanal, who celebrate the divorce of one of their number (Nadia Gray).  It’s true these occasions never turn out happy but nor are they reliably alienating.  The participants and prevailing mood are far from uniform; the events are unified at a deeper level – and poignant because they include for those involved moments of joy, satisfaction and so on.  What distinguishes La dolce vita from the other films featured in Kael’s essay is a sense of yearning and regret.  Important contributors to this include Marcello Mastroianni’s lead performance, Nino Rota’s music, and the characters of Steiner and Marcello’s father.

The latter can tend to be overlooked because he’s incongruous on the Via Veneto where, on an unannounced visit to Rome from the provinces, he meets up with his son.  Marcello’s father’s once, or so he says, ‘sold champagne to half of Italy’.  He’s retired now and, in spite of his jolly demeanour, stultified.   At first, he says he won’t intrude on Marcello’s evening but his son insists they go, with Paparazzo, to a night club.  There the older man is intoxicated by alcohol and by Fanny (Magali Noël), an ex-girlfriend of Marcello and a dancer at the club.  She takes a liking to his father too, and they go back to her apartment together.   Rubini senior is suddenly taken ill.  He soon recovers or, at least, assures his son that he’s fine to return home immediately, in spite of Marcello’s urging him to stay in Rome a little longer.

The son watches sadly as his father’s taxi pulls away.  The sadness isn’t a consequence of the hollow glamour of Marcello’s lifestyle.  It has much more to do with his feelings about his father’s getting old and more vulnerable, and sorrow that he hasn’t known him better.  Marcello confides in Paparazzo that, when he was a boy, his father ‘was never at home – he’d be away weeks at a time … But I’ve enjoyed seeing him again tonight’.  Mastroianni’s face shows surprise, pleasure and a hint of concern as Marcello watches his father, in the night club, getting into the swing of things.  Annibale Ninchi realises him with such robust humour that it’s a shock to the viewer, as well as to his son, to see the old man hushed and enervated after his funny turn in Fanny’s apartment.

This episode is exemplary of Fellini’s showing aspects of the people in his particular social group that reflect more broadly the human condition – the mid-twentieth-century human condition, at any rate.  The tragedy of Steiner does this more starkly and shockingly.  Marcello first bumps into him in a nearly deserted church where, Steiner explains, the ‘priests don’t fear the devil – they even let me play the organ’.  The words suggest that Steiner respects the cultural importance of Catholicism without subscribing to the faith.  The moment complements La dolce vita’s flamboyantly satirical (and more celebrated) references to religion, in the opening sequence and in Marcello and Paparazzo’s coverage of an alleged sighting of the Virgin Mary by two children.  In driving rain, the kids lead the rest of the crowd and the pursuing press on a mischievous wild goose chase.  This culminates in a stampede, resulting in the death of a sick boy whose mother brought him to the extravaganza in the hope of a miraculous intercession by Our Lady.

Children will also entertain and die at Steiner’s.  His little son and daughter make an unexpected appearance at his party, woken by the noise of the storm on the compilation of nature sounds.  They return to bed and their father kisses them goodnight – an image of perfect security undermined by Steiner’s admission to Marcello that:

‘Sometimes at night the darkness and silence weigh on me.  It’s a peace that frightens me.  I fear peace more than anything else.  It seems to me it’s just a façade with hell hiding behind it.  I think of what my children will see in the future.  It will be a wonderful world, they say.  But how, when a phone call can end it all?’

The question (in combination with what ‘peace’ might mean here) is a reminder that the film was made and is set in a time when fears of nuclear apocalypse were thriving just as much as western capitalist economies.  Much later on, a phone call wakes Marcello from peaceful slumber with hellish news.  Steiner has killed his children and himself.

Marcello is in bed at the time with Emma – a rare, brief, pacific interlude for these two, which follows on immediately from their most savage and extended argument.  She’s enraged by his inconstancy; he can’t stand her possessive desire for them to settle down together.  The unusual sight of Emma at rest is the last we see of her.  Entranced by the children when they put in their surprise appearance at the party, she doesn’t accompany Marcello to Steiner’s home when he learns of the killings – or, later, to the beach house where the film’s last gathering takes place.  Failure to communicate is a recurring theme in La dolce vita but, like the parties, the instances of it are varied.  Marcello and Emma exchange plenty of words without getting through to each other.  During the aristocrats’ party, in the allegedly haunted annexe to the castle, Maddalena seats Marcello in one room and herself in another; the two are connected by an echo chamber.  Her disembodied voice asks him to marry her.  He doesn’t propose but does tell her he loves her.  As his voice comes through to Maddalena, we see her already being embraced by another man.

Perhaps the most disturbing non-communication is supplied not by a human being at all but by a shapeless, swollen sea creature, caught in fishermen’s nets, which Marcello and others hungover from the beach-house party stare at on the seashore, in the early morning-after-the-night-before.  Monstrous, disgusting yet pitiable, the creature appears, as Marcello says, to be staring back at them.  What its eye means to say is anyone’s guess.  Marcello’s jokey failure to get the phone numbers of the sunbathers at the start is rhymed at the end with his abortive attempts to understand what Paola, the lovely innocent he compared on their first meeting to ‘a little angel in an Umbrian church’, is trying to say to him.  She appears on the beach at Fregene but some way away from Marcello.  The sound of their voices is drowned out by the noise of crashing waves.

This last incommunicado moment – also humorous yet truly frustrating – is typical of a film in which the tone of a scene is rarely a monotone.  The contrast between its characters’ high life and underlying ennui makes it sound like a close relation of La notte and Last Year at Marienbad but the moods Fellini creates are so diverse that La dolce vita doesn’t, in the event, feel like a kindred spirit to either.  It’s right that the final beach encounter is so tantalising.  Fellini, without irony, repeatedly implies that ‘the good life’ of the title – as something sustainable – is apprehensible but  just out of reach.  The emotional range of Nino Rota’s score – one of this supreme film-music composer’s very best – fully captures this.  The melody that accompanies the closing moments at the aristocrats’ castle, and which returns at the very end of the film, is exquisitely wistful.  Fellini conveys a sense of the spirit of the music permeating Marcello’s world by playing it, as well as on the primary soundtrack, in the background – at night clubs or on car radios.

Marcello Mastroianni fits his character, and the worlds in which Marcello Rubini moves, like a glove.  Marcello is so well known to the denizens of these worlds they almost don’t notice him – don’t, at any rate, see him observing what’s going on, as well as participating in it.  Mastroianni’s beautifully natural acting is expressive in a consistently understated way.  La dolce vita is decidedly episodic; some of the earlier episodes – notably Marcello’s interactions with Anita Ekberg’s Sylvia – are bravura highlights of the whole picture (which runs a few minutes short of three hours).  As a result, the narrative doesn’t build continuously.  Because some set pieces clearly took a lot of staging, Fellini is understandably keen to devote plenty of time to them.  A few passages – the phony sighting of the Madonna, for example – are consequently a bit too long but you’re grateful for them even so.  La dolce vita is one of a kind.  It contains so much that, pace Pauline Kael, you wouldn’t confuse with any other film – more than enough to make it great.

8 January 2020