From the spritz to the hangover
Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita, and the art of having it both ways.
I’m three weeks into a month-long trip to Italy and the hot, wet breath of Cerberus is doing its best to drive the whole of Rome off the city streets and into the nearest bar promising conditioned air and an Aperol spritz. Temperatures (hopefully) peaked on Tuesday at 41.8°C (107°F), meaning the heat has topped even Do the Right Thing levels here. If current trends continue, though, this is perhaps as cool as a Roman summer will ever be again, so book that bucket list trip fast, friends, lest you arrive in a city where Pope Francis has been usurped by Immortan Joe.
There’s been more than a little vacation mixed into the trip, but the official reason I’m here is to prepare for The Haunted Screen podcast’s second season. Given its focus on post-war Italian film, my thinking, watching, and reading over the last few weeks has been predictably pulled into the orbit of Federico Fellini. Midcentury Italy has a deep bench of auteurs—Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini—but like Godard for France or Bergman for Sweden, Fellini is his country’s cinematic cleanup hitter. If you stop someone on the street and ask them to name one Italian director, well, if it’s an American street, odds are they won’t be able to name anybody, but if they do, it’s probably gonna be Federico.
Each of us is a tangle of contradictions, but Fellini’s life and work were particularly rife with them. He was a bumpkin from the provinces, always self-conscious about his lack of education, yet he became the world’s most famous art house filmmaker. He enraged the political left as his movies drifted away from a socially conscious neorealism and toward an inward facing existentialism, and he was hated by the right for his work’s unabashed sexuality and irreverent attitude toward the Church.1 His most celebrated film, the surrealist autofiction of 8½, is a fascinating (and funny!) exploration of the meaning of art and the difficulty of human connection, but its protagonist is a filmmaker who has, by his own admission, “nothing to say.”
La Dolce Vita, though, is maybe the best example of Fellini’s talent for finding truth in contradiction. Released in 1960, the film anticipates the libertinism of the decade ahead through the picaresque adventures of gossip reporter Marcello Rubini, played by Marcello Mastroianni. In a tension that’d likely sound familiar to any number of nameless writers across history, Marcello struggles to reconcile his earnest literary ambitions with the frivolity of the life he’s actually living. This is, however, a movie that is very much of its time and place. Marcello’s Italy was in the throes of il miracolo economico, a rapid shift from peasant society to industrial power that was “fueled by massive increases in exports of such popular products as Vespa motor scooters, Fiat automobiles, Necchi sewing machines, Olivetti typewriters, and home appliances.”2 Economic change meant cultural change. An increasingly affluent—some would say decadent—bourgeoisie was on the ascent and the Vatican’s hold on the citizenry’s collective psyche was beginning to slip.
This new international prestige also manifested in Rome’s emerging status as “Hollywood on the Tiber.” Taking note of the amenable climate, abundance of experienced personnel, and modestly priced facilities at Cinecittà Studios, American execs seized the opportunity to shoot blockbusters like Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, and Cleopatra in the Eternal City. Hollywood movies brought Hollywood stars like Ava Gardner and Jayne Mansfield, and those stars were swarmed by the suddenly ubiquitous paparazzi, a class of journalist named, in fact, for Paparazzo, a photographer character in La Dolce Vita. As central as Fellini and his film-world contemporaries were in establishing the chic scene centered in Rome’s Via Veneto neighborhood, the director saw an almost apocalyptic darkness gathering beneath the stylish facade, once saying, “Rome was gradually becoming the navel of a world sated with living in a new jazz age, waiting for the third world war, or for a miracle, or for the Martians.”
That darkness is certainly present in La Dolce Vita. Marcello is a man adrift. (Fair warning: The spoiler averse should skip to the next paragraph.) He assiduously avoids the girlfriend that adores him, instead handing himself over to what one bohemian partygoer calls “the three great escapes—smoking, drinking, bed.” His mentor Steiner, a kindly intellectual who appears to be a rare steady presence amidst the Roman frenzy, inexplicably kills himself and his two young children. By the film’s end, Marcello has abandoned any aspiration to write something meaningful. His hair is grayer, he’s ever drunker, and he’s gone to work in PR. In the famous final scene, Paola—the film’s avatar of innocence and purity who Marcello had once compared to “a little angel from an Umbrian church”—calls out to him across a beach inlet. Unable to hear her, he waves her off and returns to his hungover party of the damned. It’s no wonder that in Fellini’s next film 8½, the first thing asked of his director protagonist is “What are you cooking up for us? Another film without hope?”
This apparent pessimism can be overwhelming to certain audiences. One critic called the movie “a boring epic on boredom,” and another “an ineffectual Sodom.” This interpretation, that La Dolce Vita is just a misanthropic, moralistic slog—it’s not one I can relate to. My experience was practically the opposite, that it’s a film that burns bright for the entirety of its three-hour run time. There’s no doubt that Marcello’s Rome is vapid and melancholic, but it’s also dynamic and, especially as seen through Fellini’s camera, poignantly beautiful. The image of Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain at the top of this post is iconic because of how deftly it conjures a fantasy that so many viewers want to live inside, a fantasy of sex and romance, sure, but more than that, a fantasy of a life that vibrates on a higher, more passionate frequency, one that feels more real than real. It’s a fantasy that’s fleetingly palpable at the apex of a really great party,3 when anxieties have been submerged by booze and connections sparked by adrenaline, but inevitably, it’s burned away as daylight approaches, leaving only a headache and the residue of self-reproach.
Some admirers of the film argue that Marcello’s spiritual hangover serves as a pointed moral indictment. Here’s a Catholic reviewer who broke ranks with the Vatican’s official condemnation:
Fellini’s film is an opportune and courageous condemnation of the unchallenged state of privilege, of parasitism, the cult of stars, moral decadence and the economic satiation of some social groups whose immorality is an outrage to hard-working Italians.
La Dolce Vita is definitely open to such a reading, but I’m inclined to agree with Peter Bondanella, who writes that it’s a film made “as if the director were an accomplice, not a judge,” and with Richard Dyer, who believes that its most striking feature is “its infectious brio, its verve and lightness of touch, its visual stylishness, musical wit and vivd performers.” Fellini understands both the exhilaration of the night out and the loathing of the morning after. The balance of their relative salience differs for different people at different points in their lives, but the existence of one doesn’t negate reality of the other. Neither Apollo nor Dionysus can ever score a final victory.
A film can still be great even if it purposefully overlooks the world’s messiness. I’ve written about my admiration for Rome Open City, which papered over the real divisions of post-fascist Italy in the name of national unity. But compared to other forms of expression—op-eds, academic papers, manifestoes—one of art’s great strengths is its ability to navigate ambiguity, even contradiction. Despite our attempts to try to torture it into coherence, reality itself is often ambiguous and contradictory. In a pan from the time of the movie’s release, Britain’s Sight and Sound magazine bemoaned that La Dolce Vita’s:
troupe of prostitutes, business men, tranvestites4 and aristocrats twirls across the screen, both ridiculed and glamorised at the same time; as in the gossip column, we are asked to be indignant at their scandalous behaviour and yet fully to enjoy it.5
It’s a position that implies that someone can’t be simultaneously ridiculous and glamorous, or that there’s something inherently suspect (rather than inherently human) about the commingling of anger and pleasure. There are widely varying opinions on this, but I’ve never considered hypocrisy to be a particularly damning accusation against a film. Art means many things at once, even contradictory things. It talks out of both sides of its mouth. Sometimes it tries to have it both ways, and frankly it’s often more interesting when it does. This isn’t to say that art doesn’t have a moral valence. (I teach a class called Films of Moral Struggle, to insist as much would be… hypocritical.) But it is particularly well-positioned to explore life—including life’s ethical dimensions—from a place of ambiguity.
The only way to stream La Dolce Vita in the United States appears to be through the somewhat obscure streamer FilmBox. There’s a free seven-day trial, though, or you can subscribe to the service via Amazon for $4.99/month.
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Check out Roma’s Vatican fashion show for a prime example of the latter.
Peter Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema, pg. 287.
Or a really great movie!
For an excellent exploration of La Dolce Vita’s ambivalent treatment of its queer characters, pick up Richard Dyer’s BFI Film Classics installment on the film.
For what it’s worth, Sight and Sound’s most recent once-a-decade poll of critics ranks La Dolce Vita as the 60th best film ever made.