Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4264 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-09-27
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: English, French, German, Italian
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 174 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
At three brief hours, Fellini's cynical, engrossing social commentary, La Dolce Vita, stands as his timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence, as extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni, a man of paradoxical, emotional juxtapositions: cool but tortured, sexy but impotent. He dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticises about finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Instead, he engages in a ménage à trois, then frolics in a fountain with a giggling American starlet (bombshell Anita Ekberg), and in the film's unforgettably inspired finale, attends a wild orgy that ends, symbolically with its participants finding a rotting sea animal while wandering the beach at dawn.

Fellini saw his film as life affirming (thus its title, "The Sweet Life"), but it's impossible to take him seriously. While Mastroianni drifts from one worldly pleasure to another, be it sex, drink, glamorous parties or rich foods, they are presented, through his detached eyes, as merely momentary distractions. His existence, an endless series of wild evenings and lonely mornings, is ultimately soulless and facile. Because he lacks the courage to change, Mastroianni is left with no alternative but to wearily accept and enjoy this "sweet" life. --Dave McCoy, Amazon.com

Synopsis
In Federico Fellini's popular film LA DOLCE VITA, a three-hour masterpiece that shows one man's descent into 'the sweet life' of debauchery, Marcello Mastroianni stars as eccentric journalist Marcello Rubini. On assignment to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous Italian aristocracy in a gossip column for a Roman newspaper, Marcello floats from one fabulous party to the next, meeting all varieties of beautiful, extravagant people. While he would never protest this seemingly ideal job, it makes him feel lonely and empty, and he stays up drinking and dancing night after night only to wake up each morning unbalanced and unfocused. The film follows Marcello's ups and downs in an episodic pattern in which each evening is a new story, a new adventure, a new dare, a new woman with whom to fall helplessly in love--but only for that night. Each morning the slate is wiped clean, and Fellini resets Marcello's score to zero. Sprinkled with religious images and gestures at salvation, LA DOLCE VITA is supreme in the beauty of its all-encompassing symbolism that is expressed through lavish sets, an alluring script, overemphasized physical movements, roller-coaster jazz music, and helpless emotions.

Customer Reviews

[4.5]-It's true that you must appreciate film to appreciate La Dolce Vita
This being my second Fellini film has made want him even more. Knowingly enough its Fellini's breakthrough film. In here it celebrates modern Rome as seen through the eyes of a celebrity journalist, Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a frustrated writer earning his keep by staying out every evening on the Via Veneto where he comes into contact with the rich and famous. We are supposedly witnessing the moral decline of Western civilization, and the worship of movie stars as religious icons. The reporter has a live-in girlfriend, who wants to get married, the possessive and depressive Emma (Yvonne Furneaux). He has many dalliances; one is with a bored nymphomaniac society gal (Anouk Aimee).

In this sporadic tale Marcello moves around the city with the paparazzi, ready to catch the action, and he has the power to make and break the Celebes he covers. Marcello, a celeb himself, attends nightclubs and parties that go on until dawn that are given by intellectuals, hedonists, the decadent rich and various other parties. One such memorable scene is over a false miracle (the media has a field day as a pair of children claim to have seen the Holy Virgin); the most moving scene is the suicide of an intellectual friend (Alain Cuny), that is done with compassion for the morally upright vic; and, finally, an orgy, that became the film's reason for being.

I have a few favorite scenes that lift the film above the muck: the opening shot has a helicopter lifting a statue of Christ into the skies and leaving Rome. As far I can see, it symbolically augments the departure of God for Fellini's prophetic vision. Another memorable scene is over the Trevi Fountain (Mastroianni goes into the fountain where visiting Hollywood actress Anita Ekberg is bathing). The warmest scene had Marcello meeting with his father (Annibale Ninchi) and tempting him with the sweet life.

The film veers between high culture and trash, with a little of everything in between. Because the sex was frank, the Catholic Church condemned it as a dirty movie (which I can imagine increased its box office). The film is much more than that, it's Fellini's statement about him as an artist and how he wants to make movies as both real life and fanciful art. It's winsome because of the stylish cinematography, which fills the screen with mind-blowing bizarre visuals. It's a special film, but has become dated; it points its finger at decadence with a certain titillation but just as easily seems to be grounded with a sophisticated attitude in its need to search for a way to find the sublime. Like its playboy hero Marcello, it can't make up its mind if it wants to grow up. You might say that our hero has become a victim of something that's too good to leave, but ultimately may not really be that good for him.

Uptake on the shallowness of the fast life (SPOILERS)
Fellini themes are common to many of his films, but what makes La Dolce Vita so memorable are the cynical tone, the Nina Rota music, and the string of terrific visual images.

The opening scene is of a helicopter hauling a gilded plaster statue through the air across Rome. The flying saint is a bizarre image but serves to set up the movies which is all about images and events that are never what they seem to be.

Notable are the scenes of statuesque Ekberg in that terrific strapless black dress with the voluminous skirts as she swishes around dancing and eventually wading through a city fountain. The party scenes are also notable. The first because of the intolerable intellectuals who sits around and talk and talk but never do anything. The last party has the indelible image of Mastroianni "riding" a drunken blonde woman as though she were a horse. The final image of the giant dead fish is quite unsettling as it symbolizes their bloated lives.

Fellini is brilliant in filling scenes with odd people as extras, usually hideously dressed or wearing ugly glasses. The "gallery" of people who inhabit the city is one of grotesques, vapid fashion slaves, the rich, hangers on, etc.

A long film, but highly recommended and very memorable.

Vidual poetry
Yes, it could be argued that the film goes on a bit, but there's so much visual poetry and philosophical resonance in every scene, all of which conspire to make this film one of the greatest ever. Enduringly relevant and satisfying.