Long considered a major filmmaker, Federico Fellini established his reputation through an insistence on the interest-value of his own fantastic and idiosyncratic vision of the world
In so doing, however, he repeatedly lays himself open to charges of egomania, self-indulgence and superficiality; certainly much of his work, if visually extraordinary, is hyperbolic, naïve and incoherent
This film about the hedonistic, amoral life of Rome's "beautiful people" is really a series of startling episodes held together by a character played by Marcello Mastroianni, a gossip columnist who is himself caught up in the aimless, scandalous "sweet life."
Filled, like all Fellini films, with stunning, bizarre images and faces and marked by the director's wild comic imagination, the film was widely condemned as "vulgar, witless, and intellectually bankrupt" and lavishly praised as "a cultural and social document, as well as an exciting entertainment."
"La Dolce Vita" moves from one shocking sequence to another It is a sprawling epic satire on what Fellini considered the spiritual malaise of modern society It followed a journalist employed by a scandal magazine around a Rome obsessed with orgiastic parties, voluptuous film stars and the commercial marketing of religion While its images are flamboyanta statue of Christ flying above Rome suspended from a helicopter, Anita Ekberg dancing in the Trevi fountain, a kitten on her headthe film's despairing tone often rings meaningless, even though Mastroanni's compulsive womanizer, never glamorized, fails to achieve redemption
This film about the hedonistic, amoral life of Rome's "beautiful people" is really a series of startling episodes held together by a character played by Marcello Mastroianni, a gossip columnist who is himself caught up in the aimless, scandalous "sweet life."
Filled, like all Fellini films, with stunning, bizarre images and faces and marked by the director's wild comic imagination, the film was widely condemned as "vulgar, witless, and intellectually bankrupt" and lavishly praised as "a cultural and social document, as well as an exciting entertainment."
"La Dolce Vita" moves from one shocking sequence to another It is a sprawling epic satire on what Fellini considered the spiritual malaise of modern society It followed a journalist employed by a scandal magazine around a Rome obsessed with orgiastic parties, voluptuous film stars and the commercial marketing of religion While its images are flamboyanta statue of Christ flying above Rome suspended from a helicopter, Anita Ekberg dancing in the Trevi fountain, a kitten on her headthe film's despairing tone often rings meaningless, even though Mastroanni's compulsive womanizer, never glamorized, fails to achieve redemption