Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is a playboy and entertainment reporter, living adjacent to the rich and famous, and though that proximity and his own charms, he is living the sweet life. He hangs out at night clubs, bars, and parties, often with Paparazzo (Walter Santesso), his photographer, at his side. In the course of a week, he has a liaison with a rich woman in a prostituteās flooded apartment, ends up in a fountain with a movie star (Anita Ekberg), covers a story of children claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary, takes his ignored and overdosing girlfriend (Yvonne Furneaux) to the hospital, takes his father to a club where he hooks up with one of Marcelloās ex girlfriends, hangs with the intellectual elite, and hitches a ride with an acquaintance to a castle where the truly rich and bored search for new indulgences.
If you have never seen La Dolce Vita, but know it only though the images that have made it into general pop cultureāAnita Ekberg standing in the fountain or dancing without her shoes, the statue of Mary being dragged through the sky by a helicopter, Mastroianni hanging out at one club or another hitting on womenāyou likely think this is a comedy or romance, or at least a moving, light drama. The title means āthe sweet lifeā after all. And the bits with the reporters (the word āpaparazziā came from this film) are biting and darkly humorous.
But La Dolce Vita is a melancholy affair. It competed with fellow Italian release, LāAvventura to capture ennui, and while it might have lost that race (LāAvventura is unrelenting in its despondency, a film that feels like a ghost story, without the ghost, unless everyone in it is a ghost), it ends up hitting harder. La Dolce Vita sparks with energy, points out possibilities, sucks you inā¦ And then it gut punches you. And after itās done that several times, it finally settles into the gloom that was always there, but hidden by the imitation of life. Sound dour? It is. The film is fun to watch, until it isnāt. There was something in the water in Italy at the turn of the decade.
La Dolce Vita (like Lāavventura) examines the world via the idle rich, though it doesnāt suggest that either being rich or idle is the problem; itās just that the rich lack the distraction of having to scramble to survive, so the emptiness of life is more apparent. The problem is alienation. No matter how much Marcello mixes and plays and intertwines with others, heās fundamentally alone. And heāll always be alone.
Yes, dour. But itās beautiful, and it makes its point. In fact its only real flaw is it makes that point too well. About half of the third act could have been cut as weāve seen it all and know exactly what it all means. Both the castle event and the final party drag. Poor editing pulls the whole down, but it was so high before that it can handle it, with the result a must-see film.