LA DOLCE VITA = THE SWEET LIFE
LA DOLCE VITA = THE SWEET LIFE
La Dolce Vita is an Italian movie directed by Federico Fellini.
The movie title means in English "The Sweet Life".
People sometimes use la dolce vita or the dolce vita to mean a life that is full of pleasure and luxury.
La Dolce Vita is an easy going, often dissolute, way of life.
The movie stars Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg and Anouk Aimee.
The film addresses so many topics: fame, love, sex, money, journalism, class, the aristocracy, show-biz, women, ageing, religion… everything. And does it with little explication: it’s up to the viewer to “live the film” and draw his own conclusions… brilliant.
In1959/1960 Rome, Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) is a writer and journalist, the worst kind of journalist--a tabloid journalist/paparazzi. His job is to try to catch celebrities in compromising or embarrassing situations. He tends to get quite close to his subjects--especially when they're beautiful women. Two such subjects are local heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimee), and Swedish superstar-actress Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), with both of whom he has affairs despite being engaged to Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), a clingy, insecure, nagging, melodramatic woman. Despite his extravagant, pleasure-filled lifestyle, he is wondering if maybe a simpler life wouldn't be better.
Marcello is a society gossip columnist. During one of his rounds, he re-encounters Maddalena and spends the night with her in a whore's bedroom. When he comes back home the next morning, he discovers that his girlfriend Emma poisoned herself because of him. Later, he goes to the airport where the famous star Sylvia is arriving: he will go with her a few days - A chronicle of a decadent society where there are no more values except alcohol and sex, and no solutions but suicide.
Basking in the allure of early-1960s Rome and bustling Via Veneto's elegant sybarites and cosmopolitan celebrities, hopeful writer and now-stylish columnist Marcello Rubini spends his nights looking for the next big story--or better still, a new excitement. Balancing between hedonism and cynicism, self-loathing, and an irrepressible yearning for freedom and beauty, the philandering reporter will put his undeniable charm to the test, when international film star and unattainable object of desire Sylvia arrives in town. Against the backdrop of the eternal Fontana di Trevi, dreams burn down, as an undying hope for a better future gives way to a new set of enticements--this almost-feral passion for life and an equally unquenched desire for love have always defined Marcello's thirsty existence.
PLOT OF THE MOVIE :
A DOLCE VITA presents a series of incidents in the life of Roman tabloid reporter Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni)--and although each incident is very different in content they create a portrait of an intelligent but superficial man who is gradually consumed by "the sweet life" of wealth, celebrity, and self-indulgence he reports on and which he has come to crave.
Although the film seems to be making a negative statement about self-indulgence that leads to self-loathing, Fellini also gives the viewer plenty of room to act as interpreter, and he cleverly plays one theme against its antithesis throughout the film. (The suffocation of monogamy vs. the meaninglessness of promiscuity and sincere religious belief vs. manipulative hypocrisy are but two of the most obvious juxtapositions.) But Fellini's most remarkable effect here is his ability to keep us interested in the largely unsympathetic characters LA DOLCE VITA presents: a few are naive to the point of stupidity; most are vapid; the majority (including the leads) are unspeakably shallow--and yet they still hold our interest over the course of this three hour film.
The cast is superior, with Marcello Mastroianni's personal charm particularly powerful. As usual with Fellini, there is a lot to look at on the screen: although he hasn't dropped into the wild surrealism for which he was sometimes known, there are quite a few surrealistic flourishes and visual ironies aplenty--the latter most often supplied by the hordes of photographers that scuttle after the leading characters much like cockroaches in search of crumbs. For many years available to the home market in pan-and-scan only, the film is now in a letterbox release that makes it all the more effective.
The tag line of the film was that the movie that shocked the critics...uncut, uncensored for all to see!
Some critics even gone to comment strongly recommended.
The movie's targeted audiences are mature adults.
The movie teaches us that life can be ‘fun’ but also can be tragic &, yet, outrageous.
LA DOLCE VITA is just so… immersive. Really takes you on an emotional and psychological journey. With images and vignettes that will stay with you for a lifetime.
The easygoing life without any morals will result in repentance at a later stage of life.
Though the forbidden fruit is desired it will lead to self pity and no one to care in the final years of life.
FREDERICO FELLINI :
Federico Fellini is a Neo-realist filmmaker and world renowned for his contributions to film world.
Influenced early in his career by the Neo-realist movement, he developed his own distinctive methods that superimposed dreamlike or hallucinatory imagery upon ordinary situations.
Fellini was born on 20 January 1920, to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. On 25 January, at the San Nicolò church he was baptized Federico Domenico Marcello Fellini. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family's vehement disapproval, she had eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later.
He died October 31, 1993 aged 73 years, Rome, Italy.
FILMOGRAPHY :
81⁄2 inspired, among others, Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965), Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979), Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980), Sogni d'oro (Nanni Moretti, 1981), Parad Planet (Vadim Abdrashitov, 1984), La Película del rey (Carlos Sorin, 1986), Living in Oblivion (Tom DiCillo, 1995), 81⁄2 Women (Peter Greenaway, 1999), Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993), and the Broadway musical Nine (Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, 1982). Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), a Spanish novel by Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, features a dream sequence with Fellini inspired by 81⁄2.
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