(1) As a film, it rejected the hum-drum process of one continuous story with a beginning, middle, and end attached to a plot, which the average reader or film spectator takes for granted.
(2) It focused on one character; one man, played unforgettably by Marcello Mastroianni in perhaps his greatest role, where multiple brief stories and adventures occur in relation to him, so, like those great works of classic literature, ‘La Dolce Vita’ delivered the same reeling anecdotal focus via a relationship to the mind, work, and friendships of one man.
Journalistic influence
This film’s relationship to classic modern literature is further proven by director Federico Fellini’s also being its scriptwriter, so we are immediately made aware that ‘La Dolce Vita’ is not an example of communicative interpretation or adaption of someone else’s work, but rather both a literary and cinematic individual source of creativity.
In addition, a parallel comparison of Mastroianni’s central role as a Roman journalist in post-war Rome’s hectic period of civic and economic rebuilding, and Fellini’s actual job for years as a literary journalist for a Roman newspaper before he turned to filmmaking is clearly relevant to the film’s success as a work of art, based on genuine social realities or experiences.
‘La Dolce Vita’ delightfully focuses on the pleasures and pains of everyday life, and provides intellectual excitement by showing and discussing these pleasures and pains in brilliant scenes and dialogue.
The key to this film’s delivery of human values that are not fabricated sensational fantasies acting as a definition of ‘entertainment’ resides in its balanced view of any normal nation or society’s everyday life, which does not exclude people of exceptional economic status, and should never be reduced to a one-sided negative focus by popular media — whether newspapers, magazines, books, TV, or films — or strategic political actions with the power to freeze civilian everyday life towards stagnant discontent.
For example, this is perhaps one of the first films of Western civilization where Black persons are not stereotypically presented as servants, underprivileged or uneducated outsiders, criminals or violent delinquents, but rather normal, serene, civilians or professionals participating in the pleasures of life alongside Europeans and Americans who never emphasize their difference.
Mastroianni’s role/altruism
Mastroianni, a roving Italian journalist involved in several episodes this three-hour film records without any simplistic explanations, is witness to diverse emotional situations, ranging from joyous and spontaneous outdoor jazz and rock-and-roll, dancing, café hopping, brief love-making, etc, to sad religious crowds awaiting public miracles with superstitious faith, or an intellectual friend’s unexpected act of suicide and infanticide.
‘La Dolce Vita’ (The Sweet Life) is a unified cinematic experience which does not separate and elect one aspect of its emotional content as its ‘true’ topic, since Fellini’s concern as an artist is with truth itself, as a neutral value, outside any inner dictatorial bias tempting our opportunistic viewpoints.
The film has to be seen from its first scene to its last, since, despite its fragmentary content, certain scenes and characters return, completing their significance like a revelation not established before.
Indeed, Mastroianni’s detached professionalism, worn down by the swing between the opposite experiences of pleasure, argument, hurry, relaxation, partying, sex, nightlife, shock, anger, boredom, and always the concentration his writing demands, is quite simply and beautifully resolved at the film’s very last scene, after an exhausting night of hedonistic ennui, and the discovery on a beach of an unclassified, disturbing, one-eyed sea monster caught by fishermen (perhaps symbolizing life’s obvious potential ugliness) when a simple young working-class waitress he had previously met while writing his novel at a café reappears and waves invitingly for him to return to her café.
This brief final episode is a perfect example of the necessity of an uninterrupted pleasurable everyday social life, exemplified by an un-jaded working class civilian.
Perfect cinematic form
The brilliant fragmentary artistic form of ‘La Dolce Vita’ is justified by the fleeting stories Mastroianni encounters in his job as a professional journalist. Fellini finds the perfect signifier to unify these stories that come and go without any continuous plot.
‘La Dolce Vita’ opens with a famous scene that has gone down in film history: An helicopter flies over Rome, lifting a large stone statue of Jesus, with his upraised arms, attached by ropes to the helicopter’s base.
Mastroianni is in a second helicopter, accompanying the statue to the Pope at the Vatican; he jokes with some voluptuous girls sunbathing on a rooftop who call out to Jesus as if he were present and wave to him.
This scene, like others, proves Fellini’s involvement in Surrealism’s creative use of delightfully shocking juxtapositions (as in Andre Breton’s beautiful modern poetry) rather than its often vaunted identification with anarchic attitudes to art.
This stunning opening scene is part of Surrealism’s deep psychological beauty, where spiritual and physical, religious and corporeal pleasure, signified by sexy girls in bikinis waving at Jesus, are not allowed to be unequal everyday values.
‘La Dolce Vita’ and time
Very little in cinema — since 1961, when this film was released — can compare with Fellini’s scriptwriting. Mastroianni is perfectly convincing as he speaks profoundly of wanting an art of precision and guidance, of gladly accepting being the father of children of any race or colour in riveting scenes and dialogue at a house party, where an actual still-life painting of Giorgio Morandi, one of Italy’s greatest 20th Century painters, is observed and discussed; where poetry, philosophy, the customs of other cultures are praised or pondered; and other scenes where Italy’s rich and poor lifestyles are accommodated as one realistic ‘truth’.
‘La Dolce Vita’, by its antique and modern juxtapositions, deservedly achieved status as an international film classic. Perhaps all its endless scenes of pleasurable nightlife and social parties made it a trendsetter of sorts in those exciting cities around the globe, where certain secure neighbourhoods, streets, avenues provide a succession of cafes, nightclubs, restaurants, bookstores, cinemas, and packed sidewalks, where writers, artists, professionals, celebrities, tourists and paparazzi can be found, night after night, providing and participating in everyday social pleasures.
But Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ makes such a ‘sweet life’ not an ideal passing trend of the 1960s, but an indispensible everyday social necessity based on the first-class art that it is.
