La Dolce Vita

La Dolce Vita
Image:LaDolceVita.jpg Original movie poster
Directed by	Federico Fellini
Produced by	Giuseppe Amato Angelo Rizzoli
Written by	Federico Fellini Ennio Flaiano Tullio Pinelli Brunello Rondi
Starring	Marcello Mastroianni Anita Ekberg Anouk Aimée Yvonne Furneaux Magali Noël Alain Cuny Nadia Gray Lex Barker Annibale Ninchi Walter Santesso Jacques Sernas
Distributed by	Koch-Lorber Films
Release date(s)	February 5, 1960 19 April, 1961
Running time	174 min. / 180 min. (USA)
Country	Italy / France
Language	Italian French English German
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

La Dolce Vita (Italian for "The Sweet Life") is a 1960 film directed by Federico Fellini. It is usually cited as the film that signals the split between Fellini's earlier neo-realist films and his later art films.

Synopsis

Set in Rome, Italy in the 1950s where Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) covers the more sensational side of the news; movie stars, religious visions, and the decadent aristocracy.^[1]The film shows seven days and nights in the life of the reporter.^[2]

Marcello is living with Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), a woman who loves him and wants a traditional marriage, but she is possessive and shows little ability to understand his unarticulated search for value and meaning in his life. He has encounters with other women – Anouk Aimée as a beautiful, wealthy, and jaded friend/lover; Anita Ekberg as an American movie star named Sylvia. Marcello also briefly meets an unspoiled and charming girl working at a beachside restaurant.^[1]

Steiner (Alain Cuny), who has a loving family and success, is also suffering the same anomie in which Marcello is trapped. Later in the film, Marcello returns to Steiner's apartment: Steiner has shot his children and committed suicide. His ultimate expression of despair, the inability of this paragon to love enough, pushes Marcello over the edge. Instead of moving from journalism to the higher realm of writing he contemplated, he sells out to become a public relations hack, a drunk decadent party boy, now within the milieu that he previously saw as the outsider observing.^[1] In the end, he seems to have cut himself adrift on a sea of frivolity and self-disgust, with no real idea of how to find himself again.^[2]

Themes and motifs

In the film's opening sequence, Marcello and a photographer colleague, named Paparazzo, ride in a helicopter. They are following another helicopter carrying a gilded statue of Jesus, suspended from a cable. The statue is being flown to the Vatican. Along the way, Marcello's helicopter stops to observe a group of women sunbathing on a rooftop. Marcello asks the women for their phone number, and they ask him where the statue is being taken. The noisy engine of the helicopter precludes any mutual understanding. This motif of miscommunication replays itself throughout the film. The film also shows the presence of religious values and the Catholic church.^[1]

In the final scene of the film, Marcello and the girl from the restaurant meet again at the beach, separated physically by the tides, separated emotionally by his now defeated cynicism and her innocence.^[1]

Production

The film was not made on location: the Via Veneto was meticulously recreated in the Cinecitta Studios.^{[citation needed]}

In the "party of the nobles," attended by Marcello in a castle outside Rome, some of the servants and waiters (as well as some of the guests) are played by real aristocrats.

Fellini scrapped a major scene that would have involved the relationship of Marcello with an older writer living in a tower, to be played by 1930s Academy Award-winning actress Luise Rainer. After many difficult dealings with Rainer, Fellini abandoned the scene, to which the actress reacted furiously, complaining that she had "spoiled a priceless piece of cloth to dress this character that will never be!"^{[citation needed]}

Early appearances by stars

Fashion model and singer Christa Paffgen, who adopted the pseudonym of Nico and later performed with the Velvet Underground before pursuing a solo career, plays herself in the "party of the nobles" scene.

Adriano Celentano, who later became famous in Italy as a singer and actor, appears in the scene in the pseudo-ancient Roman nightclub, where Marcello makes his first advances to Sylvia.

Awards and recognition

La Dolce Vita was hailed as "one of the most widely seen and acclaimed European movies of the 1960s" by The New York Times^[3] It was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning one for Best Costume Design: Black-and-White. La Dolce Vita also earned the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.^[4]

Influence

The character of Paparazzo, the news photographer (played by Walter Santesso) who works with Marcello, is the origin of the word used in many languages (normally in the plural, paparazzi) to describe intrusive photographers.'^[5]

The final scene on the beach is referenced in Jonathan Blitstein's 2007 film Let Them Chirp Awhile starring Justin Rice and Brendan Sexton III with Coney Island beach in Brooklyn, NY replacing the Mediterranean Sea.

Trivia

• The famous scene in the Trevi Fountain was shot in March, when nights were still cold. According to Federico Fellini (in an interview with Costanzo Costantini), Anita Ekberg stood in the cold water in her dress for hours without any trouble. Marcello Mastroianni had to wear a wetsuit beneath his clothes. Still freezing, he downed an entire bottle of vodka, so that he was completely drunk while shooting the scene.

• "Paparazzo" means "sparrow". Federico Fellini called the photographer that because he thought the press photographers fluttering around celebrities looked like little hungry birds.

• The film wasn't released in Spain until 1981 because of moral censorship.

• La Dolce Vita was voted the 6th Greatest film of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

• When asked how he got the idea for the film, Federico Fellini replied that one year the fashions made the women in Rome look like big flowers. Several extremely exaggerated costumes here and there in the film (such as two women guests' cloaks in the sequence of the party at the castle) point back to this original inspiration.^[6]

• The Korean film, A Bittersweet Life, references the film. The title itself is a pun on the English translation of "La Dolce Vita", and the restaurant that the protagonist enforces for the mob is called La Dolce Vita.

References

Wikipedia information about La Dolce Vita This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "La Dolce Vita". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.