Excess and the Modern Life in La Dolce Vita

Considered by many to be director Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, La Dolce Vita is a three-hour epic that captures the essence of Rome: it’s lavish, historic, jaded, elegant, cosmopolitan, and overflowing with bizarre characters and strange vignettes.  Fundamentally, it is an allegory of excess and the absurdities of the modern condition, the emotional sterility of the Italian postwar upper class.  Interpreted by many as a spoof of the second coming of Christ (the opening scene is a shot of a statue of Jesus being helicoptered across Rome to the Vatican,) La Dolce Vita was censored by the Vatican in Italy—who disliked its allegations about the morality of the aristocracy, which the Church was strongly intertwined with—and in Spain until Francisco Franco’s death.

Marcello is a tabloid journalist living unhappily with a woman who habitually poisons herself to get his attention.  To escape the reality of his dissatisfying career and smothering relationship, he goes to many boring parties and has affairs with many boring women.  As Marcello struggles to overcome his alienation and disaffection—a condition which he is too self-absorbed to realize everyone around him shares—he becomes more and more disillusioned with the fruitlessness of his existence.

Many characters show up over the course of the film to give perspective to Marcello’s life, most memorably Sylvia, the tumescent Swedish-American film star/sex goddess who represents everything Marcello can never have: she is wealthy, universally adored, exotic, childish, overindulged, and perpetually thrilled with herself.  She flounces across Rome in over-the-top dresses, squealing with delight at everything she sees, performing endearingly airheaded antics like picking up a stray kitten in the back alleyways of Rome and rubbing it all over her face, and everyone immediately falls in love with her.  Even Fellini seems to be smitten with Sylvia’s character, as every shot involving her is sensuous, mysterious, almost musical.  The iconic scene where she climbs into the Fontana di Trevi, she is viewed as surreal and otherworldly as she symbolically “baptizes” Marcello.

Contrasting with the effervescent Sylvia is Emma, Marcello’s girlfriend, who expresses her love for him in the only way she knows how: by alternatively guilt-tripping him with her suicide attempts and mothering him incessantly.  Their relationship is juxtaposed against a Salem witch trial-esque bout of religious hysteria in the countryside, where amid a mob a pilgrims and fanatics it becomes evident to everyone but Emma that her life with Marcello is as hollow and false as the two children’s claim.

Marcello’s empty, self-indulgent life is reflected in both his father, who comes to visit and ends up going home with one of Marcello’s lovers, and his intellectual friend Steiner—a man whose bourgeois life Marcello admires—who shoots his children and then commits suicide.  After more ridiculous parties and wild debauches, Marcello finally confronts the ultimate metaphor for his existence: a dead, bloated stingray tangled in a net being devoured by crabs.  Extremely heavy and esoteric, La Dolce Vita is one of history’s great works of cinema in its unwavering look at the human condition, both satirical and sympathetic.  For those who have the patience to watch it, its message on morality and emotion is timeless, applicable to the modern life in any society.