La Dolce Vita (1960): when Fellini became Fellini-esque (Review)

On April 11th 1953, the body of aspiring actress Wilma Montesi was found on a beach outside of Rome. Her death, which remains unsolved, sparked one of the first major tabloid scandals in Italian history, as journalists from monarchist and Communist papers alike suggested the police’s apparent inability to catch the killer was a deliberate cover-up. No-one could say exactly what was being covered up, but there was a general agreement that it had something to do with regular orgies held by the great and good of Roman society; one alleged participant, the son of the deputy prime minister Attilio Piccioni, began suing people who hinted at his involvement.

The Montesi scandal is one of a series of real-life newspaper stories either recreated or alluded to in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, reissued on Blu-Ray by Criterion UK this week. A restless, near-three-hour trek through the high and low of Roman society, it ends with the corpse of a strange “sea monster” being dragged from the waves while the protagonist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) makes his way home from a decadent party. Pierro Piccioni’s lawsuits made it impossible to refer to the case in any less cryptic a fashion, but the audience at the time reportedly got the reference. During the brief time in which the Montesi case was mentionable, the public had drank in the sordid details courtesy of men like Marcello, a representative of a new kind of journalism which took scandal as its starting point. One branch of this new journalism – the paparazzi – took their name from Fellini’s film.

Perhaps Fellini detected a certain irony in one minor detail of Wilma Montesi’s death; on the night she disappeared, she was supposed to be watching Jean Renoir’s film The Golden Coach with her mother and sister, but she turned them down because she didn’t like the film’s star Anna Magnani. Had Montesi been a fan of the grande dame of Italian neorealist cinema, she might have lived; Fellini, too, was risking career death by spurning a genre synonymous with Italian film since World War II. The dreamlike and carnivalesque had always been present in Fellini’s work – most obviously in The White Sheik and La Strada – but La Dolce Vita is arguably the first film that fully indulges in the ribald, satirical, surreal grotesquerie that would come to be called “Felliniesque”. It begins with a statue of Jesus being lifted by helicopter through a cross-section of Rome, from the ancient viaducts to the construction sites for the 1960 Olympic stadiums, and ends with the aforementioned sea monster. After that, though, there’s a strange, enigmatic half-smile from a character we’ve just met, implying that there may still be some innocence in this world after all.

That smile is the starting point for The Eye & the Beholder, a 2014 visual essay by the critic-turned-filmmaker Kogonada (Columbus) included in the extras of this Criterion set. Kogonada finds particular significance in a scene halfway through the film, which appears to transition from a POV shot to a non-POV shot without the edit that would usually announce such a shift. Part of the reason for this is that, for the second time after I Vitteloni, Fellini is making a film that rejects traditional story structure. Marcello does not drive the film’s plot in the way a protagonist usually does, he merely observes the fresco of Roman life that Fellini is assembling. As such, the film can and does break free from his viewpoint.

This would make him a terribly dull character if it wasn’t for two things. Firstly, Mastroianni is at his most iconic, managing to be completely magnetic even as he does nothing. The other thing is Fellini’s wider point, that this new Rome of celebrity and spectacle is ideally suited for an empty man like Marcello. Among the many characters who briefly parallel Marcello, none are more haunting than Alain Cuny’s Steiner, an intellectual inspired by the novelist Cesare Pavese. Steiner is tormented by the hollowness at the heart of modern Italian high society; Marcello is just as aware of it but accepts it, even enjoys it. Success in the new Rome, according to Fellini, depends on your ability to be nothing.

Through it, all Fellini is entranced by the glittering surfaces of this empty life. He was a bon vivant – in an amusing extra, his assistant director Lina Wertmüller recalls him being constantly distracted by passing women’s backsides, the Sir Mix-a-lot of arthouse cinema. Films that aim to critique excess and decadence always run the risk of being excessive and decadent themselves, and Fellini wisely doesn’t even try to present himself as pious. Yet he retains a faith in art’s ability to bring clarity and meaning to all this chaos, and he’s right. La Dolce Vita has comfortably outlived even the most sensational of the stories that inspired it, as evidenced by the fact that we’re still talking about it sixty years later. Consider that the film’s most famous scene is a recreation of a genuine tabloid story about the film star Anita Ekberg bathing in the Trevi fountain. It caused a sensation when it happened – and yet who today hears the words “Anita Ekberg” and “Trevi fountain” and thinks of anything other than La Dolce Vita?

Extras are insightful and generous – some of the best have been mentioned above, but the interview with David Forgacs was crucial in helping me to understand the news events Fellini was referencing here. There are also archive interviews with Fellini and Mastroianni, as well as a collection of posters and articles from around the world concerning the film.

LA DOLCE VITA, 1960, ITALY, DIR. FEDERICO FELLINI

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