La Dolce Vita at the castro theatre (SF)

I saw this metioned on some VERY good 'top 5 movies list' posts, and it's playing at the beautiful Castro Theatre this week in SF. We're going to try to go Sunday night, let us know if you're interested.
mrs & mrs pineapple

review by mick lasalle / sf chronicle
"La Dolce Vita" is the great Fellini film. It received universal acclaim upon its release in 1960, and in retrospect it's the work that best represents its director. In this one masterpiece, Federico Fellini achieved the ideal balance -- between social observation and unconscious imagery, between artistic discipline and freedom, and between the neo-realism of 1950s Italian cinema and the orgiastic flights of his later work. In its time, it shocked people. The Catholic Church condemned it. It was considered a dirty movie because it was frank about sex and included nudity, albeit brief. With such a buildup, it couldn't miss with American audiences. Partly for a dose of high culture and partly for the thrill of it all, Americans flocked to "La Dolce Vita" in its initial 1961 release. Divine decadence may have been restricted under the Hollywood Production Code, but foreign filmmakers operated under no such constraint. And so the big-city art houses became places where artistic yearning and unwholesome curiosity met -- and both came away satisfied.

Today, as will be apparent to anyone who goes to see it in its one-week revival at the Castro Theatre, "La Dolce Vita" is hardly shocking, except that it's shockingly good. It's not simply that we've become jaded or desensitized, but that the passage of time and the changing of styles have dimmed the glamour of the cafe society Fellini depicted. It no longer looks seductive, just tawdry, and consequently poignant and quite human. It is a spectacle of delusion, of precious energy -- of life -- being squandered on emptiness. At the same time, the movie's cautionary aspect is even emphasized by the passing years: Its empty glamour is not unlike our empty glamour, and its media and celebrity-drenched world is nothing compared to our own now.

The movie's opening has been justly celebrated. A helicopter is seen carrying a statue over Rome. As the camera gets closer, we see that it's a statue of Jesus, arms spread as if conferring a blessing. It's an undignified position for a religious statue, to be suspended from a helicopter, and the image carries multiple meanings. Has the place of the sacred been reduced in contemporary Rome? Is a benediction possible? Is this Rome of high-rise dwellings and bikini-clad women sunning themselves worthy of a benediction? And is Rome even capable of receiving one, if offered?

Following the helicopter in another helicopter is Marcello, played by Marcello Mastroianni, a celebrity journalist working on another story. The moral journey that is "La Dolce Vita" is that of Marcello, a strangely passive man with intense but vague artistic and spiritual longings. It is Marcello's blessing and his curse that he's handsome enough to be passive. He just has to hang around in the right places -- on Rome's Via Venetia, mainly -- and life and women come to him.

The film's structure is audacious. At nearly three hours, it's made up almost entirely of disparate incidents, each covering an individual night and each ending at dawn. The unifying element is Marcello and his progress as a man. Fellini gambled that the incidents would be fascinating in and of themselves and that Marcello -- handsome but hopeless -- would be sympathetic and compelling. He was right.

One night Marcello is going around with a chic but depressive rich woman (Anouk Aimée), who insists on picking up a prostitute and driving her home. Another night he's covering the arrival of a Hollywood star, played by Anita Ekberg, and contriving to get some time alone with her. On yet another evening, he's with a group of moth-eaten aristocrats, walking through an old castle. On many of his journeys, he's accompanied by aggressive photographer Paparazzo whose name in the plural became synonymous with heartless, intrusive celebrity parasites.

"La Dolce Vita" is always two things at once: It's a wallow in decadence disguised as a moral saga, and it's a moral saga disguised as a wallow in decadence. It's always both, and that tension is always there, within the film and the filmmaker. That's why the scene of Ekberg bathing in the Trevi Fountain has always been such a compelling symbol of the movie as a whole. She is, like the world of the film, both grotesque and alluring. And so when Mastroianni gets into the fountain with her and mumbles with lustful adoration that she's the living embodiment of all women, he is literally all wet and completely ridiculous, and yet only a dead man wouldn't have followed her.

Marcello's problem is that he doesn't believe in la dolce vita, or in anything else. He admires an artistic friend, Steiner (Alain Cuny), but discovers Steiner is hovering over an abyss of despair. In the film's most poignant sequence, Marcello's father visits him in Rome, and even the old man is seduced somewhat by the sweet life. He just doesn't have the stamina for it. In "La Dolce Vita," Fellini critiques Roman decadence but offers no alternative but boredom; he exposes the frivolity and meaningless of it all, while offering no higher vision.

Accordingly, the film can be seen as an essentially despairing work, but it certainly doesn't feel that way, because the filmmaking is so exuberant. Fellini believes everything that Marcello believes, but he can't be depressed, because he knows something else: He knows he's an artist. "La Dolce Vita" bursts with the excitement of a filmmaker suddenly and completely discovering his power.

-- Advisory: This film contains nudity and sexual situations.

"You're the mayor of shark city, people think you want the beaches open."

[ Edited by: mrs. pineapple on 2004-08-13 18:00 ]

I watched this movie a couple of months ago on video. It was quite relevant to todays world.

Worth seeing.....

yeah, we're actually going tomorrow (TUESDAY)

We're celebrating Nicky Hilton's Vegas nuptials :wink: