The Sweet Life, By the Numbers
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Federico Fellini’s breakthrough film, “La Dolce Vita,” was a seminal event in 1960, when it debuted in Europe, and in 1961, when it traveled to the United States. The distribution rights went for a reported million bucks – unparalleled for a movie with subtitles. I recall it as a movie that banned children, making it an instant object of desire. The Catholic Church tried to ban adults as well. Most Americans never got past the title and a series of widely publicized stills, most famously one of bosomy Anita Ekberg in a black gown wading in Trevi Fountain, but also a promotional shot of grandmaster Fellini wearing a dark fedora with the brim turned up, a long white scarf around his neck, and a matching kitten on his shoulder. Oh, those crazy Italians.
The title was assimilated into international discourse – “la dolce vita” conveyed far more oomph than “the sweet life” – and so was a neologism formed from the name of the protagonist’s friend, the predatory tabloid photographer Paparazzo.The picture made an international star of Marcello Mastroianni, who played the affectless Marcello. Yearning, disillusioned, emotionally impotent, he was a new kind of star, representative of the encroaching adultness of European cinema at a time when we were first heard names like Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, Wajda, Resnais, Chabrol, Olmi, and others. It was “Daisy Miller” in reverse: the world-weary old country putting on a show of chic ennui for the babes in toyland – just two years after we were legally allowed to read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
Fellini had already established himself with a deceptive slant on neo-realism that might be farcical (“The White Sheik”), affecting (“I vitelloni”), poetical (“La Strada”), or triumphant (“The Nights of Cabiria”) but was always trenchant. “La Dolce Vita” marked a huge leap in ambition, an epic of nearly three hours that revels in moral decay – it’s a fun movie about sad people trapped on a carousel, doomed to libidinal boredom. The church ought to have nodded in solemn approval: Fellini’s Via Veneto is a recruiting station for the inferno.
His 1963 masterpiece, “8 1 /2″(which, along with the four earlier films mentioned above, is available in a sparkling new DVD print from the Criterion Collection), did more to bury “La Dolce Vita” than its detractors did. Fellini followed it with more fanciful and elaborate productions, which made it seem a transitional and dated anomaly, neither as moving as its predecessors nor as creative as its successors. I wonder if teenagers encountering it today could begin to fathom the original controversy; compared to reality television, the film is utterly chaste.
But surprise, surprise: “La Dolce Vita” is finally available on DVD, and it still has a kick. The DVD print is stunning, and the package includes many extras (including an enlightening commentary by Richard Schickel, an hour of fake “commercials” that Fellini created for but didn’t use in “Ginger and Fred,” and 1980s interviews with Mastroianni and Ekberg.) Fellini’s sardonic moralism remains unwavering, and his episodic structure, allowing diverse moods, seems more deliberate and effective now than when first shown.
The episodic method became Fellini’s standard procedure; he had used it in “The Nights of Cabiria” – the accretion of incidents building toward a definition of character – and it dominated his later films. Yet there is a classicism to “La Dolce Vita” that sets it apart, not merely in symbols borrowed from Dante and Catholicism but in the way the sequences are mapped out. They suggest a collection of interrelated short stories in their parallel configurations and ellipses: We learn all we need to know and nothing more. I’m reminded of Hemingway’s “In Our Time,” a collection of stories mostly concerning one character, with a theme-setting preface, ancillary chapters, and “L’envoi.”
“La Dolce Vita” is a series of eight stories, between 17 and 30 minutes in length, plus an introduction, three interludes (three or four minutes each), and a farewell. A breakdown might go like this:
1 Introduction: Christ borne by a helicopter over an Italy that is half ancient runes and half antiseptic housing projects.
2 First story: Marcello the faux-writer whoring as a gossip columnist, rebounds between rich, beautiful, willful Maddalena (Anouk Aimee) and his earthy, possessive, suicidal mistress Emma (Yvonne Furneaux).
3 Second story: Marcello’s misguided romancing of the Hollywood movie star, Sylvia (Ekberg), the longest and best remembered sequence, is played with heavy-handed satire and several splendid comic moments, notably a Trevi Fountain kiss that never happens and a proto bar-mitzvah band that switches from “Arrivederci, Roma” to rock ‘n’ roll to Perez Prado’s “Patricia”- a recurring theme in Nina Rota’s brilliant score.
4 Interlude: the introduction of the philosopher Steiner, playing Bach in an empty church.
5 Third story: The big religious carnival generated when two children claim to see the Madonna – a genuine Fellini spectacle that, by the sheer number of extras alone, can’t help but comment on Hollywood’s religious spectacles of the era; Emma knows it’s a fraud, but prays fervently all the same for Marcello’s love.
6 Fourth story, part one: The Steiner salon, which Marcello idealizes as the perfect home, is actually an occasion for bad poetry and sententious epigrams. Through the windows we see klieg lights revolving like windmills.
7 Interlude: Marcello is inspired to try serious writing and is distracted by an angelic young woman from Perugia.
8 Fifth story: Marcello’s estranged father (Annibale Ninchi) turns up, looking for entertainment, and Marcello introduces him to a game chorus girl (Magali Noel); but he suffers impotence or another ailment and vanishes as suddenly as he appeared. The first of two references to 1922, the year Mussolini took power, indicates a political reason for his absence during Marcello’s childhood.
9 Sixth story: Fellini’s answer to Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” is to a wicked send-up of the aristocracy, which is portrayed searching for ghosts in an old castle, chattering in high-flown accents. Marcello and Maddalena declare their love for each other, but succumb to quickies with strangers.
10 Interlude: Marcello sadistically abandons Emma on a road at night, following his only emotional outburst in the film, but takes her to bed in the morning.
11 Fourth story, part two: Steiner commits an unspeakable crime, made worse by the paparazzi pursuing his unknowing wife, while Marcello stands bewildered in the heat, a dry run for his performance in Visconti’s “The Stranger.”
12 Seventh story: Time has passed, Marcello;s hair is flecked with gray and he has descended from gossip columnist to press agent; he attempts to preside over a sexless orgy in which a striptease generates yawns. “I’ve never seen such boring people,” he observes, defeated amid a shower of pillow feathers.
13 L’envoi: a giant stingray is beached, and the angelic young woman from Perugia offers salvation, but Marcello can’t hear her and turns away. In the last frame, her eyes make contact with the camera.
“La Dolce Vita” isn’t as beautiful or powerful as Michaelangelo Antonioni’s similarly themed “L’Avventura,” also released in 1960, or as exhilarating as “8 1/2,” but it has a unique charm as well as great performances and music and shots that actually merit that much overused adjective “iconic.”
Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.