La Dolce Vita (1959)
Country: IT/FR
Technical: bw/scope 173m
Director: Federico Fellini
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée
Synopsis:
A journalist in Rome neglects his wife to chase after a film star and an aristocrat, and investigates a miracle appearance of the virgin in the country. When his intellectual aesthete friend commits suicide he loses all anchorage and sinks into the debauched existence of a publicity agent.
Review:
Fellini's first big wallow in the world of extravagant showbiz types and pretentious intellectuals that so fascinated him, this is a film whose capturing of a zeitgeist has overshadowed the fact that it boasts few particularly good scenes in the dramatic sense. That is partly an adjunct of the director's vestigial neo-realist style, partly the advent of a certain laziness in his self-editorship: the opening helicopter sequence, the Trevi fountain scene, the phony miracle of the virgin, the father's initiation to Rome nightlife, and Aimée's bedding in a flooded downstairs apartment alone carry much of the emotive power and satiric bite of the piece. Mastroianni is for the most part a Candide figure in it all, a country boy transplanted, wide-eyed, to the big city, though not without blame. It marked the beginning of a long collaboration and on its own terms the film achieves sequences of majesty and sheer poetry so that it remains with you long afterwards as a portrait of an era. It both begins and ends with scenes in which Marcello vainly attempts to communicate with young women over pervasive background noise. As so often with Fellini the piquancy comes from the clash between the twin themes of hedonism and innocence, marvellously confused in the sequence covering the phoney sighting of the Virgin by some children in a country town. Marcello stumbles through a world contemplated entirely through the medium of sunglasses and camera lenses, each instruments of dissimulation, and it is telling that he lowers them at times to see better; by the time of the film's bittersweet conclusion, however, he has sunk too deep behind the razzle-dazzle of a vain celebrity culture. The girl turns to the camera and seems to ask us, 'And you? Is it too late for you, too?'
Country: IT/FR
Technical: bw/scope 173m
Director: Federico Fellini
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée
Synopsis:
A journalist in Rome neglects his wife to chase after a film star and an aristocrat, and investigates a miracle appearance of the virgin in the country. When his intellectual aesthete friend commits suicide he loses all anchorage and sinks into the debauched existence of a publicity agent.
Review:
Fellini's first big wallow in the world of extravagant showbiz types and pretentious intellectuals that so fascinated him, this is a film whose capturing of a zeitgeist has overshadowed the fact that it boasts few particularly good scenes in the dramatic sense. That is partly an adjunct of the director's vestigial neo-realist style, partly the advent of a certain laziness in his self-editorship: the opening helicopter sequence, the Trevi fountain scene, the phony miracle of the virgin, the father's initiation to Rome nightlife, and Aimée's bedding in a flooded downstairs apartment alone carry much of the emotive power and satiric bite of the piece. Mastroianni is for the most part a Candide figure in it all, a country boy transplanted, wide-eyed, to the big city, though not without blame. It marked the beginning of a long collaboration and on its own terms the film achieves sequences of majesty and sheer poetry so that it remains with you long afterwards as a portrait of an era. It both begins and ends with scenes in which Marcello vainly attempts to communicate with young women over pervasive background noise. As so often with Fellini the piquancy comes from the clash between the twin themes of hedonism and innocence, marvellously confused in the sequence covering the phoney sighting of the Virgin by some children in a country town. Marcello stumbles through a world contemplated entirely through the medium of sunglasses and camera lenses, each instruments of dissimulation, and it is telling that he lowers them at times to see better; by the time of the film's bittersweet conclusion, however, he has sunk too deep behind the razzle-dazzle of a vain celebrity culture. The girl turns to the camera and seems to ask us, 'And you? Is it too late for you, too?'
Country: IT/FR
Technical: bw/scope 173m
Director: Federico Fellini
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée
Synopsis:
A journalist in Rome neglects his wife to chase after a film star and an aristocrat, and investigates a miracle appearance of the virgin in the country. When his intellectual aesthete friend commits suicide he loses all anchorage and sinks into the debauched existence of a publicity agent.
Review:
Fellini's first big wallow in the world of extravagant showbiz types and pretentious intellectuals that so fascinated him, this is a film whose capturing of a zeitgeist has overshadowed the fact that it boasts few particularly good scenes in the dramatic sense. That is partly an adjunct of the director's vestigial neo-realist style, partly the advent of a certain laziness in his self-editorship: the opening helicopter sequence, the Trevi fountain scene, the phony miracle of the virgin, the father's initiation to Rome nightlife, and Aimée's bedding in a flooded downstairs apartment alone carry much of the emotive power and satiric bite of the piece. Mastroianni is for the most part a Candide figure in it all, a country boy transplanted, wide-eyed, to the big city, though not without blame. It marked the beginning of a long collaboration and on its own terms the film achieves sequences of majesty and sheer poetry so that it remains with you long afterwards as a portrait of an era. It both begins and ends with scenes in which Marcello vainly attempts to communicate with young women over pervasive background noise. As so often with Fellini the piquancy comes from the clash between the twin themes of hedonism and innocence, marvellously confused in the sequence covering the phoney sighting of the Virgin by some children in a country town. Marcello stumbles through a world contemplated entirely through the medium of sunglasses and camera lenses, each instruments of dissimulation, and it is telling that he lowers them at times to see better; by the time of the film's bittersweet conclusion, however, he has sunk too deep behind the razzle-dazzle of a vain celebrity culture. The girl turns to the camera and seems to ask us, 'And you? Is it too late for you, too?'