'La Dolce Vita,' through the years
By DAVID BATES
September 23, 2004
Film review: La Dolce Vita through the years
"I don't want to demonstrate anything; I want to show it." - Fellini
Coming of age during the '80s doesn't prepare one for Federico Fellini, as I discovered during an unfruitful first viewing of "La Dolce Vita" in college.
All I recall from a second viewing on video - 10 years ago? - is a fuzzy blur of black and white that may reached me at some superficial level but remained largely elusive and dull.
Whatever walls existed between myself and Fellini's 1960 masterpiece finally came crashing down last month, when I saw a restored version of the film on a Friday night in Vancouver, B.C. The show was sold out, so my wife and I grabbed a couple of the remaining seats near the front - not so near as to be uncomfortable, but close enough to be immersed in Fellini's stunning vision.
From the opening shot of the Jesus statue soaring over Rome to the climactic orgy of nihilism at the beach house, I finally got "La Dolce Vita," an experience that is simultaneously unnerving and exhilarating.
"La Dolce Vita" has eluded DVD treatment for years, but now we have it: Koch Lorber Films has released a digitally restored and remastered film in a two-disc package. It looks terrific, and the audio is deep and rich. As my anecdote should make clear, you haven't really seen "La Dolce Vita" until you've watched Marcello Mastroianni and busty Anita Ekberg projected 20 feet tall on a silver screen, but this will have to do.
I have no illusions that everyone will enjoy the film. In a land of 100-plus channel satellite television, so-called "reality" television and an apparently insatiable appetite for special effects spectacles, a three-hour black-and-white film with Italian subtitles runs up against a powerful cultural tide.
And, in fact, it was precisely such a tide that Fellini's film rebels against, the "sweet life" in which postwar Europe's bourgeoisie immersed itself at the expense of its soul. This is the film, after all, that gave us the word "paparazzi," after the character Paparazzo, the photographer pal of gossip columnist Marcello (Mastroianni). Take any frantic scene where the photographer pack is chasing, stalking or invading the personal space of a celebrity or some poor soul thrust into the spotlight by tragedy, then insert Jennifer Lopez or Russell Yates. It's the same, insane picture of social and cultural decay.
"La Dolce Vita" takes us through seven days and nights (mostly nights) with Marcello, a burned-out journalist who is both weary of and attracted by the sweet life of Italian high society. His world is a boozy blur of nightclubs, movie stars, parties, salons and, occasionally, hospital emergency rooms.
This was an intensely personal film, for everyone involved. It marked the beginning of Fellini's long association with Mastroianni, whose screen persona he acknowledged as his alter-ego. And, as critic Roger Ebert writes, "the casting is all typecasting." Look at the voluptuous Ekberg, featured on the box cover in the famous Trevi Fountain scene. She plays an ultra-glam American movie star. Can you imagine someone who looks like this playing anyone else?
Critics are fond of insisting that films like this "demand multiple viewings." Fellini surely does, but with an addendum: multiple viewings over a lifetime. People who talk about "La Dolce Vita," I've noticed, do as I've done: They cite a succession of viewings, charting the film's capacity to reveal its secrets and wisdom over time.
Certainly, no one could get everything that's to be had from "La Dolce Vita" after seeing it once. It's too big, packing too many amazing, exquisitely detailed sequences - the Trevi Fountain, the chaos that erupts after two children report seeing the Virgin Mary, the echo chamber.
The film's structure becomes evident as you watch. Some of the Christian symbolism is in-your-face obvious, some is more subtle and obscure. But the film's internal symmetry may not occur to you until later, even years later when you are drawn to discover what you suspect you missed the first time.
Why else would this movie lover have instinctively gravitated, some 17 years later, to a three-hour, black-and-white film with Italian subtitles that once bored me?
Published in the News-Register, McMinnville, OR, September 23, 2004
Coming of age during the '80s doesn't prepare one for Federico Fellini, as I discovered during an unfruitful first viewing of "La Dolce Vita" in college.
All I recall from a second viewing on video - 10 years ago? - is a fuzzy blur of black and white that may reached me at some superficial level but remained largely elusive and dull.
Whatever walls existed between myself and Fellini's 1960 masterpiece finally came crashing down last month, when I saw a restored version of the film on a Friday night in Vancouver, B.C. The show was sold out, so my wife and I grabbed a couple of the remaining seats near the front - not so near as to be uncomfortable, but close enough to be immersed in Fellini's stunning vision.
From the opening shot of the Jesus statue soaring over Rome to the climactic orgy of nihilism at the beach house, I finally got "La Dolce Vita," an experience that is simultaneously unnerving and exhilarating.
"La Dolce Vita" has eluded DVD treatment for years, but now we have it: Koch Lorber Films has released a digitally restored and remastered film in a two-disc package. It looks terrific, and the audio is deep and rich. As my anecdote should make clear, you haven't really seen "La Dolce Vita" until you've watched Marcello Mastroianni and busty Anita Ekberg projected 20 feet tall on a silver screen, but this will have to do.
I have no illusions that everyone will enjoy the film. In a land of 100-plus channel satellite television, so-called "reality" television and an apparently insatiable appetite for special effects spectacles, a three-hour black-and-white film with Italian subtitles runs up against a powerful cultural tide.
And, in fact, it was precisely such a tide that Fellini's film rebels against, the "sweet life" in which postwar Europe's bourgeoisie immersed itself at the expense of its soul. This is the film, after all, that gave us the word "paparazzi," after the character Paparazzo, the photographer pal of gossip columnist Marcello (Mastroianni). Take any frantic scene where the photographer pack is chasing, stalking or invading the personal space of a celebrity or some poor soul thrust into the spotlight by tragedy, then insert Jennifer Lopez or Russell Yates. It's the same, insane picture of social and cultural decay.
"La Dolce Vita" takes us through seven days and nights (mostly nights) with Marcello, a burned-out journalist who is both weary of and attracted by the sweet life of Italian high society. His world is a boozy blur of nightclubs, movie stars, parties, salons and, occasionally, hospital emergency rooms.
This was an intensely personal film, for everyone involved. It marked the beginning of Fellini's long association with Mastroianni, whose screen persona he acknowledged as his alter-ego. And, as critic Roger Ebert writes, "the casting is all typecasting." Look at the voluptuous Ekberg, featured on the box cover in the famous Trevi Fountain scene. She plays an ultra-glam American movie star. Can you imagine someone who looks like this playing anyone else?
Critics are fond of insisting that films like this "demand multiple viewings." Fellini surely does, but with an addendum: multiple viewings over a lifetime. People who talk about "La Dolce Vita," I've noticed, do as I've done: They cite a succession of viewings, charting the film's capacity to reveal its secrets and wisdom over time.
Certainly, no one could get everything that's to be had from "La Dolce Vita" after seeing it once. It's too big, packing too many amazing, exquisitely detailed sequences - the Trevi Fountain, the chaos that erupts after two children report seeing the Virgin Mary, the echo chamber.
The film's structure becomes evident as you watch. Some of the Christian symbolism is in-your-face obvious, some is more subtle and obscure. But the film's internal symmetry may not occur to you until later, even years later when you are drawn to discover what you suspect you missed the first time.
Why else would this movie lover have instinctively gravitated, some 17 years later, to a three-hour, black-and-white film with Italian subtitles that once bored me?
Published in the News-Register, McMinnville, OR, September 23, 2004
