Thinking about endings right now. With everything going on, it’s hard not to. Because things do end. But maybe, for the moment, let’s just focus on change. For starters, I used to drive a lot at night. Alone, mostly. There was something about moving endlessly through the city, somehow feeling like I was part of that world out there. Sometimes I would even wind up going places. But to look back even further, I’m honestly wondering what I thought when I first saw Federico Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA all those years ago at a theater somewhere in lower Manhattan that I never went to again. Maybe I was too young to fully grasp the film that I was so curious about but parts of it did stick with me, certain images and ideas stayed put in my brain as I moved further into adulthood which allowed them to finally have meaning. But addressing the film on its own is still a challenge. Not long ago I revisited it in less than optimum conditions (which could make for a short anecdote but I’d rather not) and yet there was still the undeniable reminder of a gut reaction that this was one of the greatest films ever made. And, as much as it took me time to fully grasp what the film is saying, it does mean something to me. It’s just a matter of taking a few minutes to understand what that is and some of the answers may lead to places I don’t want to go.
Still, treating LA DOLCE VITA as a sort of monument resistant to any form of critique is unavoidable and addressing the film on its own is a challenge. This is one of those films, after all, that is not to be questioned. Its status as a masterpiece has already been chiseled in stone, probably right when it was released in 1960. To be honest, I have no real problem with this. The greatness of the film feels undeniable in every single scene which should be taken as fact, especially at a time when there are too many people that feel the films of the past don’t matter so the more it needs to be said over and over how much they do. And LA DOLCE VITA matters. Seeing this film can be intimidating, just as Fellini is intimidating, and if I’m being truthful a few are easier to connect with than others. But never mind about that right now. 8 ½ is the one thought of as the artistic peak of his life and career which it might very well be but the monument that is LA DOLCE VITA is the one that feels easier to connect to for my own reasons. For one thing, I’ve never been a famous director like the main character of 8 ½ but I have been the main character of the film playing in my head all these years in Los Angeles, living my own version of what this film’s Marcello goes through in his life and I suspect many other people in this town have felt that way as well. Fellini main characters are the center of their universe, the ones privy to things that no one else seems to realize and the tedium of their epic lives forever in search of an answer is part of what it’s all about.
The film leaves an imprint on my mind, the idea of Fellini as seen through the avatar of the forever cool Marcello Mastroianni who moves through that world of decadence born out of the post-war boom of Italy and one that cannot last. It’s being lived by people who are certain the party is never going to end, a world of restaurants and nightclubs throughout the catacombs of the ancient city and driving in convertibles on a road in from the airport still filled with farm animals even as the modern world of all possibilities representing the future seems to be going up around them. Los Angeles offers its own form of decadence and if you’re lucky you can remember those late evenings when it felt like everything came together just right. But it all ends eventually and when that happens the answer to what you’re looking for is still just as elusive. Maybe the best way to look at LA DOLCE VITA is not as a monument but simply a film, one which is relatable to the things we all yearn for and try to be open to the possible messages that it wants to help you remember. Those messages are nothing more than a reminder to find the answers for yourself, hopefully before it’s too late.
Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) is a journalist in Rome, always on the town and covering stories of the beautiful people whether in nightclubs, the arrival of famous Hollywood movie star Sylvia Rank (Anita Ekberg) visiting the city, even the possibility of a religious miracle. His personal life is mostly taken up by girlfriend Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), who is always jealous and demanding of his love while he also has wealthy heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimee) on the side although he seems to know how impossible that relationship really is. His ambitions of becoming a serious writer instead of just a journalist take up much of his thoughts and he holds great admiration for his friend Steiner (Alain Cuny), an intellectual with a family who himself seems uncertain about his place in the changing world. As Marcello tries to write even while continually getting caught up in the nightlife all around, he can’t seem to figure out the answer to what his life in this world is going to be.
Maybe in the end it comes down to what we want and the choices we make, all while trying to find that unattainable something we can’t even put into words. We get stuck on the road we think we’re supposed to be going down, unable to imagine another way and even if the right thing is suddenly in front of us, it can be easy to miss. The Rome of this film is a place that I’ll only ever be able to dream about but I’ve had my own experiences in Los Angeles and if I see anything of myself in what the main character of LA DOLCE VITA (story and screenplay by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Punelli, with contributions by Brunello Rondi) is confronted with that makes sense it’s because the film is about someone who sees himself as the main character of it all, floating above the city along with that statue of Christ in the famous opening, able to observe everything, known by everyone everywhere. The statue is a symbol in how it boils the presence of the church down to one big advertisement for itself and it’s hard not to look at everything in almost every single scene as a symbol, the way the girls up on that roof offer a feeling of what the decadence of the future has suddenly become at that point in time. With all this in front of you, the sweet life never has to end with the film showing all the beauty and fascination in that opulence, plus the unavoidable truth of how empty it all is. Marcello says that Rome is like a jungle, easy to hide in which is perfect for his life and it’s the perfect way for him to observe this world he’s part of and the thrust of the film comes from the choice he has, whether to live in it all through working as a journalist or the pursuit of really understanding what it is to be a real writer, to be a serious person of any kind.
It's a film about the modern world that’s well over sixty years old now but what it presents in each section that gets divided up is still recognizable even as it all seems so alien. And like the best films, this is one that becomes something different each time. Roger Ebert wrote about this very thing in his look at the film, likely one of the best things he ever wrote, where he describes in detail how it became a different film each viewing when he returned to it ten years older than the last and I’m not going to come anywhere close to what he said but I can’t help but think of it here. Because LA DOLCE VITA is a rich, funny, moving, stupendously entertaining film, haunting, relatable and alien, fascinating every step of the way. Each scene offers an immense sense of tangible life to it, showing the madness that comes out of the modern world while desperately reaching for what is impossible, the glamour that it’s all too easy to get sucked into, the women who pass through your prism all too briefly, the ones who stick around longer than is healthy, the relationships of various types that fell away until the ultimate realization that being at some party at two in the morning, let alone even later, isn’t the way to live anymore.
What is the film to me right now? Since I’m older, I hope I understand some of these things a little better. In some ways, LA DOLCE VITA is about searching for a reason not to go home for the night, something the main character never wants to do. That’s who he is, what he’s a part of, always in search of that next party, that next woman, the next reason to avoid the next thing. His girlfriend Emma loves him, clearly to an unhealthy degree, but he doesn’t want that sort of life, at least not with her or maybe especially not with her, not with someone who claims to love him the way she does. The wealthy Maddalena is who he really seems attracted to, but he knows she’s impossible and wants to keep her as a fantasy anyway, staying at arms’ length from her money, her family and the way she floats through the world never quite saying what she thinks. He’s given a somewhat high-class choice of which sort of life is truly worthy, deciding between his hot shot status as a journalist which seems to be primarily covering the exciting nightlife all around him being lived by the people he sees every night anyway or the more respectable ideals of intellectualism found in literature, likely achieved by finishing that book everyone is always asking him about. And there is no pain like being asked about the book you’re working on but not having a good answer and you don’t even want to tell yourself what the answer really is.
Every moment is more beautiful than you can imagine and it’s one of the best-looking films ever, shot in the full glory of Totalscope by Otello Martelli who also photographed LA STRADA for Fellini. Maybe later works by the director became even more adventurous in how they were shot but here every frame showing Marcello in the middle of all that life around him has a perfection and an undeniable vitality to it which is always tapping into some kind of emotion you can’t even describe along with a few camera movements sprinkled in throughout which seem deceptively simple at first but are downright haunting. The running time, along with the length of each individual sequence, forces us to look closer at the world around Marcello that appears lush and decadent but becomes not quite as interesting as they first appear so the more the film goes on, scenes seem to go on longer than you’d expect them to, the way a party can go on too long when you’ve discovered there’s really no point in being there, the nightclubs or restaurants where you just wish the check would finally come so you can leave and all this helps the film seep in.
Everything about the visiting movie star Sylvia Rank as played by Anita Ekberg seems unattainable, but she’s a fantasy that’s right there in front of him, barely even seeming real but it’s clear the fantasy only goes so far for her as well. No matter what, Marcello is two steps behind her the whole way, polite to her boyfriend and completely befuddled by the appearance of her friend Frankie with a vaguely satanic appearance who takes over the scene when all he wants is to be with her. Marcello is desperately trying to keep the fantasy from ending, the legendary moment where she beckons him into the Trevi Fountain is one of those sequences that show better than anything in all of cinema how the fantasy we never want to end gives way to the undeniable reality of what it becomes. The entire Anita Ekberg section might be the high point in the way it becomes what we remember most of the entire three hours and want to dream of but it does make sense for the film to peak early after all that excitement, almost like a warning that it’s not really about the rush you get from being inches away from the most glamorous woman in the world, even if it did turn out to be one of the most legendary scenes ever filmed. The things that really matter are going to be something else entirely.
Whatever the fantasy is, the very idea of it keeps going and can be far preferable to the reality of it all since people don’t want the answer that’s right in front of them. They just want something more than what they have, whether that unattainable fantasy of Anita Ekberg or the religious fervor that erupts into total madness found in the girls who insist they’ve seen the Madonna with the people all around them seemingly just as crazed as Emma desperately prays for Marcello to love her. The party at a castle where Marcello is greeted by members of a family who are barely awake and this party that has already been going on for way too long devolves into a search for ghosts as he spends the night in a dark corner with a woman he’s latched onto since the woman he’s really looking for has vanished and like all those parties it only ends because the sun comes up. The streets of Rome often appear to be empty, especially during all those dawns, except for the crowded sidewalk of the Via Veneto where Marcello is one of the crowd and people seem to spend all their time either gossiping or fighting. That glamour is all part of the fantasy and on the surface there’s almost nothing cooler than Marcello Mastroianni checking out the scene around him in his sunglasses, just as there’s nothing more glamourous than how cool Anouk Aimee is with that stunning look as she stands by the bar wearing dark glasses to hide her most recent black eye as she waits for Marcello, or maybe just waits for anyone. There’s no possible way to learn that all this isn’t what we really want without wanting to look this cool in the first place.
And Rome is the only place Marcello wants to be. Never seen at his apartment or office he wants to be out there in the city, maybe at that restaurant on the Via Veneto but he never even seems to want to stick around there for very long and maybe being always on the move isn’t the right strategy for someone who wants to be a writer. He never even says what he wants to write about or what his novel would be and maybe if he knew there wouldn’t be such a question about it all. The one time he tries to write, or at least wants to try, he gets distracted by a young girl named Paola working at a tiny seaside café who seems to represent all innocence and good in the world, the one person whose very presence indicates why he should be doing it or at least wanting to do it or do anything at all of value. For as long as the party scenes go on, this moment passes before we even realize it and Marcello doesn’t seem to realize how important the person, however young, he’s just met really is. There’s too much else around him now, the salon he’s invited to at Steiner’s apartment offering him conflicting answers and a ghost of the past in the form of his visiting father, someone he never really knew and now desperately want to connect with, looking so eager to share some of this life with him when he turns up but it’s way too late for that. And Steiner, his friend who seems like the pathway towards a more fulfilling existence, is the one who comes up with the worst answer of all. The almost unreal arrangement of a dead body found just sitting up is an image that likely inspired a scene in BLUE VELVET and David Lynch is another artist whose obsessions throughout his career can be traced to Fellini in how they can be personal almost beyond understanding yet somehow it all feels understandable down in the soul. It all comes from the places where answers can be found, just as all the dawns in the film seem like they might provide an answer for just a moment, even if it gets forgotten just as quickly.
Those things can also happen in Los Angeles which make me think even more about the film and maybe some of this is projecting, wanting to make the life I’ve lived seem more interesting than it is, but so what. The scene at Café Figaro in Los Feliz feels like the restaurant on the Via Veneto whenever I walk by or sit down for a little while and, no, that’s not my life in the slightest and yet I’d like to think of it that way at least a little, living in a place in a part of town where everyone goes, you can just drive up to it and there’s the person you’re looking for. A long time ago I even got to see the sunrise near the end of a party at a well-known screenwriter’s mansion and you can guess what I was thinking about at the time, looking up at the light and wondering how I got there. Marcello isn’t rich but he's seemingly known by everyone, and every time Maddalena appears it’s hard not to think of certain women who have passed through my life that also have money that you want to keep at arms’ length even when they say certain things about what they want from you because when you do finally reveal something of yourself to them it never goes the way you want to, just as it happens to Marcello when he takes that chance. He doesn’t get the moment he so wants from his father either. When he walks off at the end, it feels a little more than likely that he never tries to show that part of himself to anyone else again.
The grotesquerie of later Fellini hasn’t quite taken hold yet and here the beauty found in all of the faces shows an unforgettable layer of character to them while finding some sort of balance just as Anouk Aimee seems to be between impossibly attractive and yet somehow haunting to her expression, as if to tell us we don’t really want to go to a party with these people, there’ll be no way to leave and the whole point of living is to see the sun come up at the end of the night, because after that you’re nothing. Just as the spectacularly glamorous and larger than life look of Anita Ekberg seems unreal, yet there it is and for all the talk of symbols and meanings, there are also random pleasures like hearing Nico say the word “spaghetti” that she’s looking forward to eating as well as the soul provided by Nino Rota’s score, the background to the never-ending party which becomes as important as anything.
And there’s imagery that doesn’t need to be analyzed, it’s just there, understood on some sort of emotional level and can mean whatever you want, not a code to deconstruct, the sinking feeling that comes from the sight of the photographers, the name of one inspired the term Paparazzi, and the way they swarm a woman Marcello knows, unaware of the bad news she’s about to receive. Marcello seems to crumble inside at this moment so his look of self-loathing as Emma screams that he’ll never know anything about love at him says it all. But he always goes back to Emma. And she knows he will. He doesn’t want love in the end. He never wants to know what the next day will be. Then they’ll fight again and then he’ll go back to her yet again. His key decision made before the final sequence comes offscreen and with no real friends left aside from the people shouting his name all along the Via Veneto the choice he makes in his life is a way of making no choice at all, a prison which is the only kind of freedom he ever wants. He probably sees Maddalena again at some point. Of course he will. It also doesn’t matter. And then at the final party we see the end of all that, one more night that seems to go on forever and the people who broke into that house refuse to leave (minor side note and quibble which is kind of a spoiler: In the translation on the Blu-ray restoration released by Paramount, Marcello announces near the end he’s now working ‘in advertising’ but in earlier versions he says ‘publicity agent’, which seems to make the point better). Everyone around him will keep shouting “Marcello!” late into the night as if he’s the ringmaster in charge of it all but in the end he’s just one more person at the party that some will have no idea what he’s doing there. In the end, he’ll be forgotten and able to hide in that jungle for as long as he can.
By the final scene at a party that refuses to end complete with a striptease that no one cares about so the night just fizzles away, the glamour isn’t there anymore. The sea creature that washes up onshore that they go to gawk at is almost like the ultimate symbol of all, Marcello’s own dreams and aspirations that once were and are now nothing, far away just like the girl calling out to him asking a question he’ll never hear. The more I watch the final moment the more it affects me. Is this all it’s going to be? Shouldn’t you remember that voice asking what happened to you? What do the things that I desire mean? Does the life I’ve lived mean anything? Of course, reality is going to come around eventually. It was always there somehow. In the end, LA DOLCE VITA, a film about refusing to let the party end so life can begin, knows what the answer is but all it can really do is observe what Marcello decides in the end. Never choosing and choosing nothing is the same. Because doing otherwise might mean the end and there’s always the chance things might go on forever if you don’t. That’s one way to keep from ever thinking about the future. The final shot represents the hope of everything good in the world. We can accept that if we wish. We can smile back if we choose to.
Much of the great performance of Marcello Mastroianni seems to be about the sadness in his face, the growing awareness that people are seeing what little there really is to him and it’s an extraordinary piece of work. The women in his life are just as unforgettable, the otherworldly beauty of Anita Ekberg, the coolness of Anouk Aimee, the desperation of Yvonne Furneaux. It’s clear that he’ll never fully know any of them, just as they’ll never know him. All the faces that float past become memorable, Annibale Ninchi as Marcello’s father, Magali Noel as the girl who takes a liking to him, Alain Cuny as the haunted (and haunting) Steiner, Lex Barker as Sylvia’s boyfriend, Alain Dijon as Sylvia’s downright scary friend Frankie and especially Valeria Ciangottini as the young Paola who represents everything good in the world.
“I don’t think I know how to write,” Marcello tells Steiner at one point. Of course, this could be my motto as well. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how. For now, if I go out at night, it’s probably just to dinner or a movie. Maybe a quiet get-together at a friend’s house. LA DOLCE VITA is totally alive, all these years after it was made, but it’s also become a film that I somehow understand in some small way, or at least I know what I want to take from it each time I see it again. It doesn’t make me qualified to say that this is one of the greatest films ever made but that’s exactly what it is. Maybe I’ve changed enough to be able to realize this. From change comes endings but you never know when that’s going to happen, just like you never know when someone is going to call out and try to help you remember what you once wanted. If you’re willing to hear that voice, if there’s still a way for you to understand the message, it may turn out to be the only thing you ever needed.
