La Dolce Vita (DVD)

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Some films are so legendary that you have to wonder how it is that you missed seeing them. Italian director Federico Fellini is such an iconic name that I've often alluded to him when joking about people who try to film quasi-artful home videos—and I've never even watched the film that has been acclaimed as one of his masterworks. Until now, that is.

"La Dolce Vita" was just released on DVD for the first time, and I'm happy to report that the two-disc package is worthy of a film whose reputation precedes it. The restoration and transfer is excellent, with the black-and-white picture looking even more striking in widescreen (at an aspect ratio of what appears to be 2.35:1, enhanced for 16x9 televisions) than the 1.33 ratio we normally see.

Although "La Dolce Vita" is indeed stylish, with scenes that will remain etched in my mind, I actually expected a film more daring in its visual innovation—Kama Sutra-like camera angles no one else had previously tried, or cuts and dissolves that might reflect the impending drug culture of the Sixties. I expected a film that pushed the censors to the very edge of their scissors. In point of fact, "La Dolce Vita" is an elegant, post-beat, art house film, but nowhere near the artistic explosion I had imagined in the build-up my mind had given it over the past 25 years. That's the problem with reputations and expectations. Still, this was a film that won the Golden Palm at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director, winning for Costume Design. More importantly, it expanded the narrative stage for filmmakers.

"La Dolce Vita" is introduced by filmmaker Alexander Payne, who admits to not being a Fellini expert (how many are?) but nonetheless gushes how "La Dolce Vita" is "a giant canvas of beauty and ugliness, seduction, melancholy, humor, imagination, and mystery." He also offers a succinct explanation of what Fellini did in 1960 that was so innovative: "Rather than pushing his protagonist through a unified three-act story, Fellini follows him through a series of seemingly disparate episodes that form a loose, narrative string—a string which is suddenly pulled taut only in the final moments of the film." And that's what gives the film its honest (and sometimes unpredictable) range of emotions, rather than following a typical character arc from point A to point B.

"La Dolce Vita" opens with a visual stunt worthy of the late, great, master of surrealism, Salvador Dali. A helicopter hauling a statue of Jesus swings across Rome, high above the the ruins of the Coliseum. It pauses over sunbathing beauties in their bikinis so its occupants can shout, "We're taking it to the Pope," then try to get the sunbathers' phone numbers. And THAT is a stunt worthy of ones that Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their rich friends pulled in Paris and on the French Riviera three decades earlier. Fellini's cameras follow a new generation of jet-setters every bit as careless, affected, and self-absorbed as Tom and Daisy Buchanan and those bombed party-goers from "The Great Gatsby."

In Rome, circa the late 1950s, Fellini's cameras follow jaded journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni, in a role that brought him international fame) as he bounces from one jet-setting event to the next. Marcello could pass for a playboy himself, and not just because of his good looks. Under the guise of work, he functions the same as any guest at these parties, and lavishes his attentions on more than a few women. He leaves one club with a rich woman (Anouk Aimee) who sports a fresh bruise under her sunglasses. No one noticed her, because more than a few people wear shades indoors, apparently just to be cool. In her car they drive until they see some women and offer a ride to one who is apparently a prostitute. Ahh, the bored rich and their diversions, those never-ending attempts to amuse oneself! They make love in the prostitute's bed in her flooded basement apartment, and then it's on to the next diversion.

And what a diversion! A blonde bombshell—the American equivalent of Gina Lollobrigida— shows up and instantly captivates the jet-setters. The beautiful and buxom Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) is egged on by a beatnik sort of minor actor (Alain Dijon) who gets her and the rest of bored society dancing. Lex Barker (of "Tarzan" fame) plays her ever-inebriated boyfriend, who is posed in his drunkenness by paparazzi and photographed at close range. There are plenty of comic moments, as Fellini satirizes the lifestyles of the very rich and famous every step of the way. One particularly memorable scene comes when Marcello, infatuated with Sylvia, whispers while they're dancing, "You are the first woman on the first day of creation. You are mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, earth, home." But of course he says this in Italian, which she does not speak, and so she's oblivious to his rhapsodic come-on.

None of these flirtations (or at least the ones she's aware of) please Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), Marcello's live-in girlfriend who's deservedly suspicious of his dalliances and tries to commit suicide more than once. But whether Marcello is lavishing his attentions on the newest celebrity darling, confronting his estranged father, hanging out in clubs with the beautiful people, attending private functions of his rich friends, or passing time with his female interests, you get the feeling that Marcello is indeed just passing time. No longer a reporter, like the rich he writes about his life has become so enmeshed with theirs that their attitudes have also become his. And like them—especially like his friend, Steiner—it bothers him.

"La Dolce Vita" came out during a time when existentialism was experiencing a resurgence in academia, and Steiner could be the poster child for the existentialist's fear of nothingness. "Sometimes at night the darkness and silence weighs upon me," he confesses. Eventually, despair will take its toll on Steiner and his family, as we see a change wrought in Marcello as well. Weary of the sweet life, he goes from the bemused tag-along to buffoon leader. But the average viewer will be well ahead of him. As fascinating as their jet-setting antics are for the first two-thirds of the film, they can seem just as tiresome as the film plays itself out. Which is to say that while fans of Fellini and foreign films will relish every moment, like "Short Cuts," Robert Altman's fascinating adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories, "La Dolce Vita" will feel overly long to the average viewer. The problem is this: how do you write about plastic people without creating a narrative that seems, itself, loaded with plasticity? And how do you show how weary Marcello has become of this Roman circus without tiring the audience as well? If you're Fellini, you don't. Fellini is into voyeuristic filmmaking, chronicling life as it is lived, not life as it fits a 120-page screenplay formula.