Italy, 1960
Directed by Federico Fellini
With Marcello Mastroianni (Marcello), Anouk Aimée (Maddalena), Yvonne Furneaux (Emma), Anita Ekberg (Sylvia), Alain Cuny (Steiner)

Two helicopters flow over Rome: one is carrying a huge statue of the Christ and the other a couple of journalists reporting on the unusual air cargo bound for the Holy See. But the journos find enough time to hover above a modern building to catch the attention of some young ladies sunbathing on the top. This opening sequence hints at the dimensions Federico Fellini wants to give his movie.
Long shots are a fixture, capturing characters often moving inside large rectangular frames featuring either vast urban landscapes or spacious rooms. Their narrative starts in the sky and then it is told by a camera rushing along long corridors and big streets, touring awesome monuments, from the Vatican to a famous fountain, and eventually embracing the horizon of the sea. The story demands as much space as possible to develop and to breathe; the expansive and multifaceted space Rome becomes under the camera’s eye acquires a cosmic dimension that readily engulfs the audience.
Rome, where all the ways lead to, Rome, which was an imperial capital, Rome, that has put a spell on the lead character, still matches the audience’s expectations and yet its shape is not quite the same. Director Federico Fellini chooses to shoot modern neighborhoods, like the EUR, with their concrete buildings and unfinished streets. Old Roman streets of the inner center are barely shown, and only because they please Sylvia, a visiting foreign actress. Sometimes, the action moves elsewhere, in the rural periphery, in rather out of time places. Rome is clearly in the midst of physical transformation, caught in a rush to modernize and to grow, a sea change that carries the characters along.
Marcello, the hero we meet in the chopper, is a writer. His story tells of the dubious success of an intellectual man who ekes out a living writing on celebrities and popular events even as he yearns for more ambitious scribblings. His main sidekick is a freelance photographer who is always looking for a celebrity and tends to work and huddle with other like-minded colleagues as if in a swarm. An actor of the modern-day development of the mass media, he is Paparazzo – a fictional surname that has turned thanks to the film’s success into a substantive which is now widely used – and despised.
More that writing, the big affair in Marcello’s life is women. He likes to seduce and in the second sequence of the film he spends the night with a friend, Maddalena, a cynical aristocrat, at a prostitute’s home, right away associating a whiff of scandal to his philandering. He falls again in love with Sylvia, the famous foreign actress whose trip he is supposed to cover, and he tries to satisfy all her whims, which, however, will not extend to romance. Later, as he wanders in an abandoned castle with other guests, he lets an exuberant visual artist take him away to have her own pleasure.
But his womanizing inevitably hits a wall: his partner Emma who first appears as she tries to commit suicide. Their relationship is tumultuous as Marcello does not want to quit her and or bow to her will and as jealousy and disappointment gnaw at Emma’s nerves. Their rowdy love affair runs in parallel with Marcello’s adventures and near the end finds a memorable and histrionic expression as the couple violently quarrels in a deserted road during part of a night – before spending the following morning in their bed. It could be that, apart from any deep feeling hard to decipher, even for him or her, Marcello sticks with Emma because his rake’s progress actually moves backwards. As already noted, Sylvia is not interested in sex while his relationship with Maddalena leads nowhere as she wants to be free for her own pursuit of physical pleasure. Marcello’s romantic affairs disquietingly look like idle caprices. He may be obsessed with women but he is denied pointedly any full satisfaction.
If the female half of the world is a letdown, the male half is no less frustrating. Marcello’s friendship with Paparazzo and his colleagues is rather superficial. The visit his father pays to him is only a reminder of the emotional distance that has long prevailed between them. The strongest bond he feels with a man involves Steiner, an influential intellectual. The evening Marcello spends at his flat is the quietest and more sophisticated moment during the long stroll in a fair of vanity that his story is. Yet, the distinguished and serene atmosphere conceals a crack-up, Steiner’s view on his life. He sees it as flawed, claiming he is going nowhere for he is too serious to be an amateur but not enough to be a scholar and seriously doubts his children can have a great future. This intimate despair leads to an unexpected and shocking conclusion when he later chooses to kill his children and then himself.
This loss proves a turning point for Marcello. In the final part of “La dolce vita”, he is transformed: no smart dark suits but flashy white attire; no ambition for literature but a job in the public relations business; not a word on Emma but a garrulous involvement in a pathetically raucous and drunken party to celebrate the divorce of a female acquaintance. The party-goers wallow in indecency and stupidity while Marcello performs the duties of a master of ceremony, in a scandalous manner, ready to humiliate and keen to provoke. His stroll has ended in a dead end; the final picture on a seaside as a monstrous ray is caught by fishermen depicts a man on the brink of isolation and dislocation.
To describe it a fall from grace may not be that relevant. The phrase supposes the movie began in a jolly good atmosphere – as noticed earlier, it starts with a scandalous night with a female friend right away followed by his partner’s suicide attempt – and posits a moralistic worldview that would rather leave Fellini unconcerned (indeed the film caused outrage when it was rewarded at the Cannes festival and then released for featuring its characters’ immoral antics without blinking). “La dolce vita” arguably looks more like a poignant depiction of an irresolute, disaffected fellow seeking to find a sense of purpose and of happiness. His tragedy lies in his inability to connect with suitable partners, even in Steiner’s case as he repeatedly acknowledges he failed to keep in touch with him.
The most telling image, and the most heartbreaking, takes place in the nightclub he goes with his father. In a turn of the revue, a clown walks on the floor playing a melancholy air on the trumpet, trying to stir the stranded balloons left by previous dancers. The instrument blows a wrong note and the clown glances at Marcello’s table. Marcello glances back. The trumpet starts again the melody and the clown moves away, the balloons following him in close ranks. A single and accidental instant speaks volumes as the existential malaise of Marcello suddenly finds an expression worthy of it, a malaise that he reluctantly acknowledges. The festive milieu and the sweet life give his personal life a material reality, but they are also illusions which cannot always paper over uncomfortable feelings. And indeed, the pieces begins to fall after that exchange of glances: his father gets sick and more tragic events happen, from the night quarrel with Emma to Steiner’s suicide.
This talent to instill eerie, distressing, or dreamy moments in a lively and realistic environment was emerging in “I Vitelloni” (1953). Now Fellini takes it on a grander scale, turning a whole film into a journey in an individual’s soul till the ultimate failure, one step after another, while the narrative becomes a baffling but riveting collection of deliberately expanded sequences switching from one strange place to another, from one desultory development to another, warping and challenging the narrative logic the audience could expect and instead dragging them into another experience of time and action. Lost in a modern world and lonely because he fails to connect, Marcello looks like a tragic hero for our times. He struggles with modern-day travails and his fight meets an end that is both tragic and grotesque. However, in this sullen finale, the candid smile of the girl on the beach invites us to sympathize with Marcello, just like she seems to do, even if he sorely fails to remember who she is. After all, he may not be more fragile and fallible than we may already be ourselves.