La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition) | Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg

La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition) | Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg | Classic and beautiful

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La Dolce Vita (2-D...

	La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition) Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg Koch Lorber Films, 2004 average customer review:based on 106 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

At three brief hours, La Dolce Vita, a piece of cynical, engrossing social commentary, stands as Federico Fellini's timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini (extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence. A man of paradoxical emotional juxtapositions (cool but tortured, sexy but impotent), he dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticizes finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Instead, he engages in an ménage à trois, then frolics in a fountain with a giggling American starlet (bombshell Anita Ekberg), and in the film's unforgettably inspired finale, attends a wild orgy that ends, symbolically, with its participants finding a rotting sea animal while wandering the beach at dawn. Fellini saw his film as life affirming (thus its title, The Sweet Life), but it's impossible to take him seriously. While Mastroianni drifts from one worldly pleasure to another, be it sex, drink, glamorous parties, or rich foods, they are presented, through his detached eyes, are merely momentary distractions. His existence, an endless series of wild evenings and lonely mornings, is ultimately soulless and facile. Because he lacks the courage to change, Mastroianni is left with no alternative but to wearily accept and enjoy this "sweet" life. --Dave McCoy

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Titanic film

La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), as ironic a title as has ever been used in motion picture history, Federico Fellini's 1960 film commentary on modern hedonism and anomy, and filmed in 1959 in Rome, may just be the best film in his canon, for it combines the Neo-Realism of earlier classics like La Strada and Nights Of Cabiria, while admixing some of the surreal touches of his later classics. Plus, it is the best written and most ambitious of his films. In many ways, its lead star, Marcello Mastroianni, would play a similar version of this film's lead character, gossip journalist Marcello Rubini, in Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (The Night), which followed the travails of a marriage over a single night. While this film does not follow a marriage, it does follow Marcello's personal travails over the course of a week full of nights and early mornings- although not necessarily in that order. Otherwise it may have been better titled La Settimana (The Week), or La Vuoto Vita (The Empty Life).
This film is often coupled with its immediate successor film, 8½, and usually compared to negatively by most critics. It's the superior film, however, because, despite being even a bit longer, at just about five minutes short of three full hours, there is not any of the fat that could be trimmed from 8½. The later film is also a more personalized Fellini romp, and while some scenes may have biographical import to Fellini and film scholars, they do not work in service to the narrative within that film. La Dolce Vita, however, has no such fat, and, indeed, could have gone on a bit longer without feeling the least bit tedious, for Fellini employs the same picaresque narrative techniques he did in earlier films. In essence, instead of one long nearly three hour film the viewer is watching a series of seven or so twenty to thirty minute long short films with just one recurring character.
This also allows for a good reason to justify why Marcello's character does not grow internally. He is the eternal troubadour, a modern emotionless Odysseus, flouncing about from one meaningless encounter to the next. That does not mean there are not moments of true depth and insight, and critics who have accused the film of being void of any deeper psychology are just plain wrong. Because someone is shallow does not mean that there is no reason beneath that façade, it just means there's not much beneath the façade- and that can be explained if one really pays attention to the film. In the film's commentary, critic Richard Schickel notes that film critic Alfred Bazin claimed that all of the characters in the film are simply behaviorist paradigms, without any internal motivations. Yet, we see far too many scenes that contradict this stance- one senses motivated by politics rather than art, and because one simply cannot delink one from the other. Behavior is caused by motivation, and scenes we see of Marcello with other minor characters- Maddalena, Emma, Sylvia, Paparazzo, his father, Steiner, Paola- clearly sketch in much of the man's background before the film starts.... The film's screenplay, written by Fellini with Ennio Flaiano, is impressive, not just for its written brilliance, but for the boundaries it pushed open for film as an art form. Nino Rota, as usual, provides a superb musical score. Perhaps only the Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann pairing equals the contributions of Fellini and Rota in creating memorable film scores. The art direction by Piero Gherardi, and cinematography by Otello Martelli, are all top notch, as well. The acting is first rate. Marcello Mastroianni went from a second tier Italian film star to an international sensation on the heels of his performance, and Anita Ekberg became one of the top pinup girls of the 1960s. Granted, her acting is not much, but the other females in the film are top notch, and all the supporting cast do well- especially Alain Cluny as Steiner and Annibale Ninchi as Marcello's father. Thankfully, the film's original producer, Dino de Laurentiis, didn't get his way and force Paul Newman into the lead role, for Mastroianni has a facile quality that the steely glare of Newman could never convey....Some believe that the seven days and nights of the film correspond to the seven hills of Rome or the Seven Deadly Sins. That is not really of import, for great art is never so easily and simply parsed. Whatever the reality is, the fact is that there's never been a better film about the anomy of the human condition- and it's not just modernity under scrutiny, for clearly Fellini shows that the pilgrims at the Madonna sighting, are as lost as any of the modern glitterati, thus implying it is endemic to the human condition, and reflected in the very picaresque structure of the film. La Dolce Vita is one of the great works of art by one of the greatest artists of the last century, and in that statement, there's not a hint of irony.

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Classic and beautiful