Critics reviews

All that we think we want, we don’t know and can’t control. The dark circus of life, the visual power. Moral force, savage indictment. Intoxicating on every level.

Fellini finds an aching, unshakeable truth about the power and rot of fictions, and the perilous state of existential being those who facilitate these myths and stories find themselves in.

[Fellini's] best films live and breathe and morph, none more so than the picaresque La dolce vita(1960), which may be his most nearly perfect, astutely rueful, least sentimental work: an improbably entertaining, three-hour tragicomedy about people frantically trying, without much success, to stay entertained. [It's also] one of the most prescient of all films.

The multitude of characters that Marcello encounters in these buzzing assemblages over the film's almost-three-hour running time gives La Dolce Vita a novelistic density. Fellini offers his fair share of fools and sinners, but makes sure to toss in some sages and saints as well. Like Marcello, we become intoxicated by the possibilities each new set piece holds, even as we are made increasingly aware of the disillusionments that mark their conclusions.

La Dolce Vita lives forever. Fellini may have set out to explore the outer delirium and inner rot among a subsection of pampered starlets, amoral gossip-hounds, pretentious socialites and funereal aristocrats at the peak of Italy's Economic Miracle and burgeoning gliteratti culture, but Vita is a universal fable, as universal as Dante's Inferno.

Historians can laud it as the transitional pause before the director fully abandoned any neorealistic flourishes and dove into the psycho-personal surrealism known as the Fellini-esque. Yet everyone else will simply admire, in slack-jawed stupor, the way this 51-year-old time capsule thoroughly predicts the era of TMZ, Paris Hilton and celebutante overload. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. How sour it still is.

For every long face in this movie, there are three or four lit up, and usually aimed at Marcello Mastroianni, who is near the height of his seductive prowess. Even when his head is obscured in cigarette smoke and his eyes hidden behind several pairs of sunglasses, you want his Casanova to hurt you. (And he probably will.)

In one movie, at least, the ethical baseline (heisted, you could argue, from Sweet Smell of Success) gave Fellini's roaming, cluttered mise-en-scène a chilling gravity he could never genuinely locate again. La Dolce Vita's welcome cynicism was powerfully influential, at least here—open season was declared on official cultural industries in so many films (The Manchurian Candidate, Medium Cool, The Long Goodbye, Network, etc.) that it became an American new wave motif.

Few films have indelibly defined society as caustically and honestly as Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

The film was hugely successful and widely praised in its time, though it's really nothing more than the old C.B. De Mille formula of titillation and moralizing—Roman orgies and Christian martyrs—with only a fraction of De Mille's showmanship.