La Dolce Vita (1960)
This film was directed by Frederico Fellini and made in 1960. I really liked it and after I watched the film I watched the director’s cut and I read an article on it. The film is the very first film that has the paparazzi as a main character in the film. The main character is a reporter for a tabloid newspaper, and so he is one of the paparazzi. His name is Marcello.
The film has a structure that is made up of seven episodes. Each episode lasts for about a night. The episodes start at night and end in the morning, and in each episode the main character Marcello has a problem that may or may not be resolved in the morning. Some examples of these episodes are:
1. Marcello goes out with this rich aristocrat woman and then comes home the next morning and his fiancee has tried to kill herself and he has to take her to the hospital.
2. Marcello goes out walking around with a movie star named Sylvie and he tries to make her like him but then the next morning her fiancee tries to beat him up when he takes her back to her hotel.
3. Marcello goes out with his father to a club and and they hang out then his father leaves to go home the next morning.
One thing that I tried to make sense of was the ending of the movie. In a lot of movies, things are said that are really important at the end, or the main problem in the movie has been solved. First, it’s hard to tell if this is really the end of the film because you never know if the episodes were shown in order or not, so that is something to think about. But let me tell you what the movie’s ending was. In the end, there was a really big party that got kind of crazy and in the morning, everyone who was still awake goes down to the beach. They see this really big dead fish on the beach that looks prehistoric, and it is dead. No one has ever seen anything like that before. Then, Marcello sees a girl that was his waitress before, and she is further down the beach. She tries to tell him something, but he says he can’t hear her and goes back with the people who are having the wild party.
When I watched the director’s cut, the film critic that was talking over the movie said that this meant that Marcello was seeing a vision of Christianity that was dead, which was represented by the fish. Then, he said that Marcello saw the young girl who was his salvation but he doesn’t listen to it and because of that, he stays lost.
I think thats a really interesting way to think about the movie, because all of the different episodes that they show in the night time basically have people doing whatever they want and they don’ t always do what they think is right, for example Marcello is always cheating on his fiancee with other women. So, you could say that the director Fellini is showing how no one in that time had any morals.
I would definitely recommend this film because it is supposed to be one of the best films ever made.
-Plum
picture from passionforcinema.com
You are so systematic in your thoughts and expression.
I am planning to see this movie a second time, just because it’s so famous. Fellini is a great artist but unfortunately even a person that gifted ends with a feeling of futility and aimlessness.
I would much more admire someone who fights for a great cause, like MLK. There was a great movie about Dr. King.
This film ranks comfortably in my top 25. I wrote an essay on the film awhile back for my newspaper column. I think you’ve picked up on a lot of the symbolism of the film, particularly the inability to communicate in correlation with the symbols of Christianity (Statue & fish – beginning & end) among others. The film is ripe with symbolism, but I find Marcello more interesting and devastating than any of the more trivial intellectual matters that Fellini teases us with.
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