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SPOILERS***

La Dolce Vita is a film that dissects and explores the meaning of art, transitioning between various unconnected scenes that defy all sense of a coherent story and come together to form a film that is very much a piece of art itself. But the components of this particular piece of art remain incomparable to any film made in the last 50 years: the sounds, the wonder, the love, the music—the breaking point of humanity. And as much as we aspire to disassociate our deepest passions from our deepest fears, the two sometimes unavoidably collide. To capture such as aesthetic on film—the aesthetic of hope in the face of despair—is a monumental achievement. But director Federico Fellini took it one step further, integrating the all-too-relatable desire for understanding into an incredibly entertaining film full of dancing, singing and music, all of which tug at the very meaning of art.

While each and every scene of La Dolce Vita features the burnt-out journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), and each and every scene sends him deeper into the pits of melancholy and incomprehension, there’s very little traditional connectivity. But if you’ve seen a Fellini film, you’ve probably experienced such a strange, successful process. 8 ½ comes to mind, with the story shifting between dream sequences and Fellini’s dream-like reality. But La Dolce Vita’s unstructured story doesn’t delve into the fantastical like 8 ½ or Juliet of the Spirits; it’s much more like Amarcord in the way it treats its quirky characters and random events as part of reality. Instead of abandoning the film’s eccentricity, we hum along to the unpredictable singing monologues and we tap our feet to the playful dancing. Dancing itself, much like it does in 8 ½, becomes a natural movement, with characters easily stepping into a dance or randomly busting a move that doesn’t misguide them from their destination.

The scenes of full-on dance sequences and musical numbers are a wonder to witness, from the trumpeter who has a connection with balloons to Fellini’s masterful tracking of Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) and her entourage’s dance routine, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Like very many of the characters convey throughout the film, the music and dancing in the film become pieces of art to appreciate for their beauty. For many, what lies on the surface suffices as captivating art. The intricacies of dancing—the steps, the hips, the flow, the movement—bypass all those people simply content with witnessing something beyond the ordinary. Some, however, fail to every make such a connection.

Steiner (Alain Cuny), one of Marcello’s good friends, is an intellectual that’s lost any and all child-like appreciation for art. Reaching an old age, Steiner managed to completely disengage himself from any ignorant or blissful infatuation of art, instead resorting to the dull, detailed components, rendering art a sterile and academic affair. “One should live outside of passions, beyond emotions,” Steiner says. “In that harmony you find in completed artworks, in that enchanted order.” But does Steiner know true harmony? The answer comes within his own party, where he accidentally plays some nature sounds through an old recording. Embarrassed, he quickly turns it off, only to be pestered by Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) to play the sounds. Emma is impressed by them, and relishes in their beautiful simplicity, with no distracting images to cloud the sounds of trickling water, birds chirping or a gentle breeze. Steiner, on the other hand, seems detached, attaching the sounds to nothing more than a recording that belongs in a library of recordings.

Even more discouraging is Marcello’s numbness to the recordings, or any real form of art whatsoever. He shows no enthusiasm for his profession; he mocks Emma for finding the pathetic trumpeter to be tear-worthy; he stands back as Sylvia begins a dance party; he’s unable to write his novel. He treads from person to person, night after night, looking for a sign that will deliver him some meaning. But in true Fellini fashion, the answer lies within the character himself. We see it in Nights of Cabiria, when Cabiria discovers happiness by realizing the simple joys around her, not searching for a grander picture; we see it in Juliet of the Spirits, when Juliet finally lets her husband go, thus releasing the spirits that haunted her mind; we even see it in La Strada, where Zampano’s infamous breakdown sends him down the road of realization and self-forgiveness. Fellini, at the end of his career, said the only character he still worried about was Cabiria. If I were Fellini, I’d be more worried about Marcello, who receives so many conflicting views on art and its purpose that he eventually abandons attempt for understanding. He is pushed over the edge when Steiner commits suicide, just after murdering his two children. Earlier we see the two children smiling and dancing along to the party music, a true contrast between their content and Steiner’s lack of passion. Burdened with such an image, Marcello says to himself, “I don’t know anything…anything at all.”

Maybe Fellini isn’t worried about Marcello because of his complete lack of artistry. Unlike Steiner, who had studied art so concisely that it lead to a deep, suicidal depression, Marcello’s abandonment of finding deeper meaning sets him free. In the final scene, Marcello is happier than ever, prancing about and laughing during an orgy at a mansion. But it’s tragic at the same time. The guests mock him and call him names during his drunken rant. Nobody gets excited for the striptease, instead criticizing the woman for her technique. Marcello covers a girl in feathers, only to look down on her with no emotion when she pathetically crawls away. The party that should be filled with the most life—a fucking orgy—is unfortunately stuffed with a group to which Marcello now belongs: people who have dismissed any sort of fulfillment for the sake of living in the moment. It’s not the most respectably way to live, but it gets you from day to day.

In terms of story, “day to day” is exactly how the story moves. And while its no phenomenon to shift a character through different settings each day, Fellini’s use of symmetry to convey the disastrous cycle Marcello experiences is uncanny. The opening scene features a Jesus statue being lifted over the city of Rome, while the closing scene features a giant, ugly fishing being pulled to shore. The contrast between the images is as vast as the irony. What the statue (and religion for that matter) comes to represent, much like it did in Nights of Cabiria, is society’s desire to find meaning through a filter. Incapable of looking deep into ourselves to find answers, we share a strong attraction for spiritual figures that speak to our deepest fears and hopes. One scene features a crowd of people who follow two children claiming to see the Madonna. It ends with the mass tearing away at a tree, trying to retrieve its branches solely because the children pointed towards it. Emma herself, who believes Marcello’s love is the only thing worth living for, scrambles for branches herself. Since she cannot win his love, she feels the need for such distractions. Marcello, on the other hand, is incapable of feeling love and feels no desire to teach himself how, which is why he never ventures into the crowd. Come back to the dead fish, and you see the irony: the statue is fake, misleading and contrives an image of beauty, while the fish is real and obtrusively ugly. One sells an image, while the simply exists, not tip-toeing the lines of reality. One brings ignorant satisfaction, while the other tests your stomach’s strength. Which would you rather have?

The review discusses the ideas challenged by Fellini himself, but those ideas actually play into the character and story guidelines we’ve set and come to expect from masterpieces. Marcello’s troubles and questions harp on larger issues that plague humanity and push its own morals to the very core. Aren’t we all capable of not loving? Or committing suicide and murdering our children? Does art carry meaning beyond a painting or a drawing? Does it live and breathe within dance, music and movies? Is it safe to attach yourself to such an idea? I say: yes. Of course art owns no universal meaning, and few films display that better than La Dolce Vita, which translates to “the sweet life.” Although it digs at the horrors and drawbacks of too much understanding, Fellini’s masterpiece also balances it out with unforgettable images and scenes that tug at our heartstrings for simply being beautiful.

No scene speaks larger volumes than the film’s quietest one, which features a young girl Marcello spoke with earlier while writing his novel. She yells to him across the beach, making typing motions with her hand. Just like the opening scene (more symmetry), Marcello finds himself unable to understand the girl in the film’s closing moments. It’s a communication breakdown that goes nowhere, yet leaves both parties blissfully happy. Marcello has abandoned writing and is no longer worried about becoming an artist, while the girl goes on believing Marcello to be a poet, reminiscing about his compliments on her beauty. And then, for no explicable reason, the girl turns to the camera and smiles, just like Cabiria did three years earlier. And once again you’re caught off guard, but once again an unabashed smile spreads across your face, because you know that although we don’t always understand everything going on around us, life goes on. And if you can’t find comfort in that, then you’ve spent too much time looking for the sweet life.

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Occasionally I watch one of those films that are so famous they’re almost not films at all but something more akin to a cultural event horizon. These films have become embedded in the collective consciousness and have littered the pop culture landscape with iconic quotes, images and scenes. They have cemented the careers of directors and immortalised actors. Whenever I watch one of these films I desperately hope that they will live up to the hype. Most times I’m not disappointed. You can’t fail to love Casablanca’s endlessly quotable script, for example, or It’s a Wonderful Life’s sugary sentimentality.

La Dolce Vita, the film that gave us the word ‘paparazzi’ and one of the most famous scenes in cinema history – when Sylvia (the hyper-femme Anita Eckberg) gets sensual in the Trevi Fountain – is just such a film. When I watched it the other night for the first time I loved that scene and was unprepared for how beautiful and iconic it really is. Although it’s much shorter than I expected, the image of Eckberg – all wild blonde hair and curves, throwing herself with abandon into the water and losing herself in the magic of the quiet dawn just breaking over Rome – is as symbolic of the sweet life as we’re ever gonna get. Unfettered, sexual, glamourous and outside of time, Sylvia is a poster girl for decadence and privilege. I also love the added touch of placing a regular Joe, I think he’s a baker given that he’s awake so early, to the right of one of the last frames. Like us, this mere mortal looks on at Sylvia and Marcello leisurely wading through the water after a crazy night on the tiles while he has to get to work, chained into a dull routine of early starts and long working hours.

Despite the perfection of this scene, however, I was a little disappointed with La Dolce Vita and am still genuinely undecided about whether I loved every gorgeously-shot frame or hated every minute of it’s s-l-o-w 3-hour runtime. Like so many classics, it seems that one standout scene is responsible for La Dolce Vita’s iconic status. I also wasn’t expecting the film to be as abstract and experimental as it was; it functions mainly as a loose framework of scenes, centred around protagonist Marcello, and has no clear structure. Other director’s that I like, such as David Lynch, work in this way too, but those films seem to have endless layers of meaning that keep viewers hooked even in their confusion and frustration. There’s also usually a distinct feeling of build up to some kind of crisis or revelation. In La Dolce Vita however, there’s just an endless stream of party scenes, and the message about moral decline and excess starts to feel old and overdone way before the 3-hour conclusion. It also awkwardly straddles the fence between criticising the social elite and romanticising them. This isn’t a problem per se, in fact it can make the film more interesting, but it does wind up making you dislike certain characters, particularly the eternally dithering Marcello, always halfway between jacking in the hedonism to start a serious career and living it up as the perpetual playboy. No doubt Fellini is the master of stylish cinema, and perhaps a second viewing will change my mind, but as it is I have to say I found this film to be a bit overrated.

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Of all the canonical classics I can think of, La Dolce Vita is the one that can most persuasively claim to be about Everything. Well, “Everything” may be an exaggeration. But it’s about love, sex, god, religion, fame, celebrity, mass culture, art, the working class, the poor, the aristocracy, the intelligentsia, men, women, fathers, sons, growing old, isolation, the modern world, and Italy. To put it more simply, it’s about a personal and societal quest to fill the void.

In all likelihood, a new viewer will feel lost. The quintessential La Dolce Vita experience—what happened to me, and what may, in all probability, happen to you—is having no idea what to think while you watch it, but being unable to get it out of your head for a week afterward. On reflection (and on second viewing), what at first appears aimless is revealed to be a rich and carefully constructed array of parables, symbols, and vignettes. It doesn’t have a plot so much as escalating variations on a theme: one man (Marcello Mastroianni) wavering back and forth between earthly decadence and spiritual transcendence. Overarching conflict is almost secondary—what we have instead is a string of floating episodes, where the camera sits back and wryly observes as our hero (or is it anti-hero?) drifts through different settings and situations.

Obviously, this is not an inviting structure for a film that barely manages to clock in at under 3 hours. Fellini is a director of sequences; he sets them up and lets them run. But by the time the lights come up, so much of it haunts the memory. Within its episode and vignettes are insights, poetry, comedy, drama, and enigmatic beauty that seems to exist at the exact intersection of reality and dreams. There are very valid criticisms: you may say that it’s artificially stretched to epic length, that it became enshrined in the canon on the basis of shocking people at the time, or that its symbolism leaves so little room for ambiguity that it becomes an intellectual exercise more than anything else. (The fish = Christ, etc.). But it’s still a rich and fascinating cinematic treasure trove, and to get anything out of it is to agree to play by its rule. It is, in a sense, not a story so much as a a party: one that begins with tentative fascination, and turns sickened and exhausted by the end.

I once saw a summary of Fellini that said his films are about characters trapped between the Earth and sky. La Dolce Vita is his film that wobbles the most compellingly between the two: Fellini presents a “real” Italy, but with an otherworldliness starting to leak in around the edges–call it God, or magic, or the supernatural, whatever you like. It lingers over the film like a disembodied presence, giving La Dolce Vita perhaps the most bewitching tone of any Fellini film, and catching him at a transition before he moved into full-blown fantasias for the rest of his career.

It is, in short, a strange film, a haunting film, and a beautiful film. And it’s worth the effort.

9 out of 10

Far from being a Fellini evangelist, I still find myself forced to highly recommend La Dolce Vita, the film that gave the world the term “paparazzi.” It may have been one of the first widely viewed pictures to break from the traditional narrative form. It’s essentially a series of unrelated episodes from the main character’s life in Rome, which basically chart the struggle between his dreams as a writer and the temptations of “the sweet life.” The vignette with the Madonna sighting permanently etched itself into my memory.