Marcello is a journalist in Rome during the late 1950s who covers tabloid news of movie stars, religious visions and the self-indulgent aristocracy while searching for a more meaningful way of life. Marcello faces the existential struggle of having to choose between two lives, depicted by journalism and literature. Marcello leads a lifestyle of excess, fame and pleasure amongst Rome's thriving popular culture, depicting the confusion and frequency with which Marcello gets distracted by women and power. A more sensitive Marcello aspires to become a writer, of leading an intellectual life amongst the elites, the poets, writers and philosophers of the time. Marcello eventually chooses neither journalism, nor literature. Thematically he opted for the life of excess and popularity by officially becoming a publicity agent.
The theme of the film "is predominantly café society, the diverse and glittery world rebuilt upon the ruins and poverty" of the Italian postwar period.[2] In the opening sequence, a plaster statue of Jesus the Labourer suspended by cables from a helicopter, flies past the ruins of an ancient Roman aqueduct.[d] The statue is being taken to the Pope at the Vatican. Journalist Marcello and a photographer named Paparazzo follow in a second helicopter. The symbolism of Jesus, arms outstretched as if blessing all of Rome as it flies overhead, is soon replaced by the profane life and neo-modern architecture of the "new" Rome, founded on the economic miracle of the late 1950s. (Much of this was filmed in Cinecittà or in EUR, the Mussolini-style area south of Rome.) The delivery of the statue is the first of many scenes placing religious icons in the midst of characters demonstrating their "modern" morality, influenced by the booming economy and the emerging mass-consumer life.
Seven episodes
The most common interpretation of the film is a mosaic, its parts linked by the protagonist, Marcello Rubini, a journalist.[28] The seven episodes are:
- Marcello's evening with the heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimée)
- His long, frustrating night with the American actress Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) that ends in the Trevi fountain at dawn
- His reunion with the intellectual Steiner (Alain Cuny) their relationship is divided into three sequences spread over the film: a) the encounter, b) Steiner's party and c) Steiner's tragedy
- The fake miracle
- His father's visit/Steiner's Party
- The aristocrat's party/Steiner's tragedy
- The "orgy" at the beach house[29]
Interrupting the seven episodes is the restaurant sequence with the angelic Paola; they are framed by a prologue (Jesus over Rome) and epilogue (the monster fish) giving the film its innovative and symmetrically symbolic structure.[2] The evocations are: seven deadly sins, seven sacraments, seven virtues, seven days of creation. Other critics disagree, Peter Bondanella argues that "any critic of La dolce vita not mesmerized by the magic number seven will find it almost impossible to organize the numerous sequences on a strictly numerological basis".[30]
An aesthetic of disparity
The critic Robert Richardson suggests that the originality of La dolce vita lies in a new form of film narrative that mines "an aesthetic of disparity".[31] Abandoning traditional plot and conventional "character development", Fellini and co-screenwriters Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli forged a cinematic narrative that rejected continuity, unnecessary explanations and narrative logic in favour of seven non-linear encounters between Marcello, a kind of Dantesque Pilgrim and an underworld of 120 characters. The encounters build up a cumulative impression on the viewer that finds resolution in an "overpowering sense of the disparity between what life has been or could be, and what it actually is".[32]
In a device used earlier in his films, Fellini orders the disparate succession of sequences as movements from evening to dawn. Also employed as an ordering device is the image of a downward spiral that Marcello sets in motion when descending the first of several staircases (including ladders) that open and close episodes. The upshot is that the film's aesthetic form, rather than its content, embodies the theme of Rome as a moral wasteland.
