Fellini is a bit like Bergman or Lynch… we all have our favorites. Well, this is ours.
The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, La Dolce Vita rocketed Federico Fellini to international mainstream success—ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom. A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome’s rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist (a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni, never better) during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight.
Filled with any number of fabulous scenes—Christ and the helicopter, the mass at dawn, the final orgy, and of course Anita Ekberg wading in Trevi Fountain—juggling the sacred and profane with awesome dexterity, this mordant picture was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of contemporary Europe.
Fellini saw it coming: the film provides a prescient glimpse of just how gossip and fame-obsessed our society would become, though the new version is so much less cool than Fellini’s.