La Dolce Vita

For those who wish an appropriate English title for La Dolce Vita, I suggest: "Everyman his own voyeur: an expose in five orgies." Episodic and long, this latest Fellini effort contains brilliant camera work, but little else to recommend itself.

Fellini picks at the scabrous center of Rome's cafe society and uncovers nymphomania, homosexuality, and the rest of Decadence's retinue. Caught up by the momentum of his careening world, Marcello Mastroianni divides his time as a young publicist between sensational events, effete parties, and various bedrooms. Marcello is supposed to be struggling, some might say having an "identity crisis": should he be a serious writer or continue churning out his gossip column? After his friend Steiner, an intellectual and would-be writer, murders his children and commits suicide, Marcello abandons his former ambitions and assumes the role of Master of the Revels for the film's climactic orgy.

Usually a bald plot summary does not do justice to a movie; in this case, the resume hangs together better than the original screenplay. The script and Mastroianni's colorless acting do not focus enough attention on Marcello's character to make his fate a compelling subject. Since he is the only character to appear continuously throughout the film, he should have unified and connected the monotonous scenes of debauchery that follow each other in lubricious profusion. Through Marcello's eyes, we see one depraved spectacle after another. Individually these sordid vignettes succeed quite well, but, taken together, they do not comprise any kind of dramatic growth. Marcello's interlude with Steiner not only is unconvincing, but a bore in addition. If the funeral pace was intentional--to contrast with the orgies--Fellini erred in trying to express boredom by boring his audience. Although the Steiner episode should ostensibly have served as the keystone of his plot, Fellini did not shape it clearly enough to provide motivation for Steiner's suicide: he leaves us with only the orgy to fall back on. Without any sharply defined motivation of his own, Marcello slips deeper into the quagmire of the Via Veneto. He becomes just another orgiast.

Despite its dramatic failings, La Dolce Vita contains some of the most imaginative and skillful cinematography I have ever seen. The sleazy crowd of photographers that hovers around Marcello's car moves like a swarm of unspeakable vermin.

From the startling first scene on (a statue of Christ suspended from a helicopter flies over Rome), Fellini's use of the city itself casts an eerie tenseness over every event. Stark white, modern buildings rise like phantoms everywhere.

This macabre and sordid tone prepares for the final obscenity: Dawn breaks over the Saturnalia and the revellers run down through a forest to the seashore, where fishermen have just netted an enormous, fleshy sting ray. This could have been a powerful, almost mythic ending if Fellini had not ruined it with a phony conversation between Marcello and an innocent young girl.

Something should also be said about the "cameo" performances of well known personalities. Aside from Anita Ekberg and Lex Barker, most of these people have only a certain local notoriety in Rome. Even the impersonator of Marianne Moore adds very little interest for the American viewer. Although, judging from Ekberg and Barker, they play themselves quite well, these guest celebrities take up a great deal of screen time and only contribute a further thread of decadence to a film already tangled with them.

As a pictorial experience, La Dolce Vita is superb; as a drama it is loose and aimless. Transitions from scene to scene succeed magnificently on a visual level, but make little sense in terms of dramatic development. Perhaps there is something appropriate about the mosaic in the Gary lobby which misspells the name of Moliere.