Federico Fellini’s masterful monochrome epic is a classic of world cinema and marked the director’s first collaboration with actor Marcello Mastroianni.
Set in Rome, the episodic narrative follows journalist and aspiring novelist Marcello Rubini (Mastroianni) as he makes his way across the Eternal City, sampling the hedonistic lifestyle of celebrities including the Swedish American film star Sylvia Rank (Anita Ekberg). Working for the first time in widescreen, Fellini and cinematographer Otello Martelli craft one breathtaking composition after another—from the interiors of glamorous parties to the nocturnal grandeur of the Roman cityscape.
An essential big screen experience, La Dolce Vita proved to be a turning point in Fellini’s career. Having long abandoned his roots in realism, the film was his most visually ambitious to date. It also cemented Mastroianni’s ‘latin lover’ image, something the actor enjoyed subverting in subsequent work (including his next collaboration with Fellini, 1963’s 8½).
La Dolce Vita is one of the very few pictures whose influence extends beyond cinema and into multiple areas in fashion, music and art. Martin Scorsese once likened it to ‘a shockwave that passed through the whole culture’. Most famously perhaps, the film spawned the term ‘Paparazzo’—the name of a photographer character played by Walter Santesso.
DIRECTOR: Federico Fellini
CAST: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noël, Alain Cuny
YEAR: 1960
COUNTRY: Italy/France
PROJECTION FORMAT: Digital
DURATION: 174 mins
Age Guidance
12
