La Dolce Vita written- with others- and directed by Federico Fellini

La Dolce Vita written- with others- and directed by Federico Fellini

Another version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at:

-              https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEVa4_CsRStSBBDo4uJWT8BSWtTTn0N1E   and  http://realini.blogspot.ro/

Iconic movie.

This is not just any chef d’oeuvre, but one that has given new names in the dictionary and whose scenes are well known by film buffs.

There are images and symbols that have left the big screen and entered the so-called common consciousness, like these:

-          A statue of Jesus is flown over Rome, right at the beginning,

-          The cat that needs milk, in the arms of the Swedish actress

-          Anita Ekberg walking in the Fontana di Trevi

-          The decadent parties and the first paparazzi

Indeed, one character has also escaped the medium of the film and is now in the vocabulary, Paparazzo, the photo journalist from La Dolce Vita is now a common word in the dictionary:

-          “a freelance photographer who pursues celebrities to get photographs of them”

Few know that this was this was the companion of the protagonist of this masterpiece, but everyone knows about his “descendants”.

The main character is Marcello Rubini, a journalist brilliantly played by another Marcello- Mastroiani, one of the best cinema actors.

He is a symbol of decadence, even if the personage is complex and appears at times larger than life, able to be kind, generous, tender, friendly, understanding, sophisticated, but also mean, ruthless and even ride on the back of a woman, granted in one of the moments of climatic excess, after drinking too much.

One of the main themes of this narrative is love, albeit love for God is in the company with lust, in the same large fresco that takes on religion, modernity and the collapse of morality, suicide, art, epiphanies, the role of the journalist and the low level to which some of the press descends, even so many decades ago.

Maddalena is one of the characters that has become, I don’t know- is it immoral or amoral, for in the first case, one would still have some sense of standards, but Maddalena appears to have gone beyond that.

Very rich, she is spoiled, bored and dissatisfied, like so many, if not most of those who attend the shindigs that announce the end of the civilized world, with their excessive lust, meaningless and the aforementioned scene wherein Marcello takes this woman and slaps her around, pulls her hair and finally…rides on her back, like she was just an animal.

A climax of the sense of futility, depression, meaninglessness is reached when a suicide is accompanied by an even more outrageous act that I will not insist on, but which was also followed by a frenzy of photographers and journalists elbowing for a scoop, a picture that would get the front page.

It is a reflection on so many things, including this sick interest in the morbid, funerals, particularly horrendous deaths, celebrity shenanigans, infidelities and distastetful attitudes and excesses with terrible effects on our psyche.

When Nepal has allowed television in the country, in 1999, the violence broadcast by programs like sport, thrillers has had a terrible impact on the level of violence in a land that intends to measure Level of Happiness and insist on it more than the GDP.

The mass media, with its insistence on the negative is affecting our outlook, because even if trains running on time do not make news, we indulge in “information” that is all bad and therefore we engage in a negative spiral.

Religion is very present in La Dolce Vita, from the first scene of the Flying Jesus to the images of the men and women who fight over branches from a tree situated near a “holy place”, the sight where two children had a supposed vision.

There are faces that have a great impact, people who may experience epiphanies and others who just want to take advantage and milk this opportunity for all that it is worth.

Marcello lives with Emma, a woman that loves him too much- indeed, one personage even says to her:

-          You will be better when you understand that you love Marcello more than he loves you

At times, all the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as identified by the ultimate expert on marriages-John Gottman in his classic book The Seven Principles of Making Marriage-are present in the relationship between Marcello and Emma:

-          Criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness and contempt

And Marcello sleeps with Maddalena, in the flooded apartment of a prostitute of all places, falls for Sylvia and is always ready to go to bed with another woman, although what I thought is a symbol of innocence and a promise for the future does not appeal to him…on second thought, maybe that girl was too young for him anyway.