La dolce vita (1960, Federico Fellini) (Patreon)

55/100

Second viewing, last seen 1992. This is perhaps the most difficult type of film for me to write about (in a close race with movies I love for reasons I can't articulate): probably as great as its reputation, but devoted to a subject—decadence, in this case—that doesn't interest me much at all. That's not necessarily an insurmountable problem, but the surmounting generally requires some sort of compelling scaffolding, in the realm of narrative and/or character, to which I can cling. La dolce vita has virtually no truck with that. It's all theme all the time, attenuated across nearly three hours of structurally repetitive (in their cyclical movement from dusk to dawn) but otherwise largely unrelated anecdotes. And it's no doubt telling that the most celebrated of those anecdotes, which trades heavily on Marcello's (and ostensibly our own) hypnotic attraction to the uno percento, left me feeling somewhat restless. (Part of me thinks you kinda had to be there 60 years ago in order to have the intended reaction to Anita Ekberg, but that may well just be my own weird wiring. I was never into, say, Pamela Anderson, either. Buxom and vacuous ain't my thing.) On the other hand, I perked right up when Marcello's father appears, perhaps because that sequence comes closest to treating Marcello as a protagonist rather than just a semi-baleful witness to Rome's latest decline and fall. There's simply not that much to La dolce vita's indictment of the idle rich, apart from making them so idle at one point that it's rather surprising to see them eventually rise from the recumbent position in which we first find them (while partying!). Satyricon is no favorite of mine, and I see now that this was Fellini's modern-day equivalent, culminating in the saddest effort at Dionysian debauchery until Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice.

At this point I should confess that Pauline Kael's notorious "sick soul of Europe" essay, which eviscerated La dolce vita alongside La notte (which I quite like) and Last Year at Marienbad (which I haven't seen in 20 years and need to revisit), may have been rattling around in my brain as I watched. That piece made a huge impression on me as a young cinephile, and while I've since developed my own critical sensibility, which often diverges strongly from hers, the disdain that she expressed at Fellini's ostensible disdain for everyone onscreen stuck with me, making it harder not to perceive the film the same way that she did: as a brutally long lecture. It's not nearly that simple, though. For one thing, Fellini studiously avoids the bathetic nudging that one would expect from a filmmaker determined to make a point above all else; when Marcello and Maddalena drive the sex worker home and then proceed to fuck in her bedroom while she makes them coffee, we're not visually encouraged to identify with the woman who's been temporarily evicted from her home by a bored socialite and her boy toy. It's treated very matter-of-factly, allowing us to feel as aggrieved on her behalf as we choose. More crucially, Fellini makes a good-faith attempt to depict the seductive allure of wealth, beauty and power, so that Marcello's struggle becomes our own. This doesn't particularly work for me, alas—as noted above, the Trevi Fountain bit looks to my eyes like a fool lusting after pyrite—but I do at least acknowledge that Fellini tried, and therefore don't share Kael's indignation. Hell, even the use of Perez Prado's "Patricia" gets equally split between virtue and vice, grooved to by the movie's figure of pure innocence* and then trotted out later as striptease music. 

Wish I could say that I've talked myself into a higher opinion of the film—the preceding paragraph strikes me as a possible explanation for how some of my peers seem to properly appreciate every canonical masterpiece, without exception—but I'm always brutally honest about finding something a long haul, no matter how many cogent arguments I can muster in its favor. Sometimes you just fail to connect. (See also A Brighter Summer Day.) Point is, I blame myself: Fellini's primary "mistake" was caring deeply about something that I care precious little about, viz. the emptiness of privilege and the futility of social climbing. I enjoy La dolce vita only in bits and pieces: the helicopter prologue; expressionistic shots of Catholic miracle-seekers pelted by rain; Maddalena proposing marriage via echo chamber; the sheer horror of Paparazzo and the other, y'know, paparazzi (I'd totally forgotten that the word comes from this film!) hounding Steiner's widow, who doesn't yet know why she's an object of interest to the press; Nico's cameo as herself. Plus, as I said, the entire sequence with Marcello's dad, which functions as a nearly perfect short. That's not a bad list (although: three hours), and I'd never think to call the film overrated. Had I been on the 1960 Cannes jury, however, Le Trou (which won absolutely nothing) would have gotten my vote. 

* Who looks right at the camera in the final shot! Either that was more prevalent than I'd realized or I just happen to be encountering a bunch of examples in quick succession. (One of the others was Nights of Cabiria, now that I think about it, so Fellini used it twice in a row.)