When In Rome Season: La Dolce Vita (Dir Federico Fellini, 2h 48m, 1960)

Some films inhabit their cities, their locations like ghosts; Rio entraps our protagonists in 2002's City of God. Bickle haunts New York and in turn, the city haunts him in Taxi Driver (1976). Tokyo, out of balance, and mostly nocturnal for time-addled Americans, hangs over Lost in Translation (2003). La Dolce Vita does not just haunt Rome. La Dolce Vita is Rome; towering, yet crumbling into disrepair, beautiful, yet with a sordid underbelly of twisted affairs, philandering, celebrity, corruption, and the swarms of parasitic paparazzi that document it all. Through the eyes of drifting reporter, Roberto (Marcello Mastroianni), across seven chapters, we see the beauty and decadence of Rome at the turn of the 1960s, in one of the greatest films ever made

This story, though, begins with comparative failure. By 1952, Italian Neorealism was on the way out; and nothing typifies this more than the comparative failure of Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D, a blazing attack on the New Italy via an old man and his dog struggling against a state and people who have moved on from the war. This cinematic zenith of the genre may now rank among the best films ever made (together with De Sica's The Bicycle Thieves, (1948)) but a comparative financial disappointment. The writing on the wall was clear: the neorealist movement was on the way out. What would follow would be a genre largely daubed pink neorealism; more optimistic, sweeter, best typified in the films of Luciano Emmer, but what would come after, as the rising Italian satirical movement met the more nuanced pink neorealism would be the arrival of Federico Fellini. 

We've already spoken about Fellini in passing during Rome Open City but a little more background is required at this point. Born in Rimini in Northern Italy, and enjoying a creative childhood, so the young Fellini (his childhood forming the basis of many of his 1970s and 1980s films) leaves school and holds down various jobs in the pre-war era, including portrait shop owner and humourist. Fellini soon falls in with fellow Italian humourists, including Fabrizi, before being posted to Libya to write action-adventure film I cavalieri del deserto (Knights of the Desert, 1942), whilst dodging the Italian military draft, surviving the fall of Rome as a caricaturist, before finally being found, via Fabrizi, and becoming Rosselini's script-writer for Rome Open City, picking up the first of twelve Oscar nominations in the process. Fellini's early films range from disastrous (Variety Lights, 1950) to charmingly satirical (The White Sheik, 1951), to truly innovative, in the form of I Vitelloni(1953), which paves the way for his first Oscar win, in the form of the beautiful but stark, Nights of Cabiria, co-written by Pasolini.

By this point, Italian cinema was beginning to change in a very different way; 1951's Quo Vadis saw the start of an unexpected trend; of Hollywood stars and crews taking advantage of the cheapness of Italian labour, and the colossal size of Rome's Cinecittà Studios to make epicly scaled sword and sandal films, occasionally recruiting actresses such as Sophia Loren in these lavish productions. Moreover, around the visitations of these Hollywood a-listers, sprang up a vast army of independent photographers. Both sparked the imagination of Fellini, and, together with the scandal surrounding Turkish dancer, Haish Nana's improvised striptease that had Rome in uproar, a film began to take shape.

Rome Open City begins with a perfect juxtaposition of its key themes; the arrival of a statue of Christ via helicopter is not just a striking shot, but a nigh-unforgeable one. It is a nigh miracle, the statue seemingly floating into view beneath a helicopter, in a film that will later concern itself with the truth of miracles. Moreover, it is the film's battle between tradition and the crass post-war materialism, of Bell helicopters arriving over the top of an ancient aqueduct, and flying over the newly built tenement blocks that the film will soon return to, towards the ancient and familiar bulk of St Peters. It is here that we are introduced to Marcello, our protagonist, our world-weary Dante through Rome's sordid underworld, a man caught between the gutter and the holy, as he pauses in his reportage to attempt-and fail-to get the number of the women the helicopter flies over, before shrugging, and continuing with his reportage. The old Rome, the Rome of Rome Open City, of Don Pietro, is gone. In its place is a shallow and empty and godless city.

Marcello soon resurfaces in the first of our decadent tableaux, the ultra-rich and famous at play forming the backdrop to the exotic dancers, Christ replaced by Buddha, and nameless women replaced by the first of a revolving cast of women whom Marcello seduces, in the form of Maddalena (Anouk Aimée). Whilst their differences are summed up by their perspective on Rome, with Maddalena wanting to leave, and Marcello loving the city for all its imperfections, they soon find themselves picking up a prostitute, travelling through the less salubrious areas of the capital, to her modern, and already run down flat. Whilst the film will return to juxtapose the rot of the modern and the endurance of the older parts of the city, here it forms merely the backdrop for just the first of Marcello's many trysts, as the prostitute is left outside her room, a forlorn figure as the couple make love.

So are the women of Marcello's life-we see, after he returns home, his fiancée,Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), has overdosed on drugs, and whilst he rushes her to the hospital, amongst the nuns and stark white walls, Marcello cannot help but be drawn to other women, stealing from the hospital room to ring Maddalena. This is a cycle that continues throughout the rest of the film; Marcello concerns himself with four major women. Maddalena and Emma return throughout as companions, Marcello taking the latter on assignments with him, including to the site of a would-be miracle, and in the film's starkest scene, throwing her out of the car after an argument-Emma's love is maternal, gentle, but their relationship cannot-will not-last, and later sequences see Marcello older and alone. Maddelena, in comparison, is high Italian society. Marcello reunites with her in the grounds of a castle, in a sequence including several real-life models as themselves, including a pre-Warhol Nico, on the outskirts of the city, and asks her to marry him, only for her to retreat into another room, soon to leave with another man.

At the centre of the film, though, is Anita Ekberg. At the centre of La Dolce Vita is Sylvia; it is she that dominates the film in the popular imagination, and long after her character has left the film, her presence lingers on-we see her enter the film as a positive star, arriving out of a jet to the massed press who follow her every move, scattering over each other as they attempt to capture her beauty, her presence. Nowhere else in the film does it come so close to capturing the relationship between fame and the paparazzi, nowhere in this film do we see the power of Rome's popular culture, nowhere else in the film does Marcello more become bowled over by power and femininity more than in the form of Sylvia. We see Marcello quickly construct an itinerary intended to eventually win her over, but for the first and only time in the film, a woman has the measure of him.

their climb to the top of St Peter's Basilica may be euphoric, its view spectacular, but she never truly surrenders to his charms, even in the wake of her husband being openly dismissive of her, and even in the film's most iconic scene, as they wander through the streets of Rome at night, and wade together into the Trevi Fountain, she still feels in control of the would-be relationship, which abruptly breaks up with the return of her husband and his admonishment of her, and his savage attack on Marcello. The dream passes, the spell breaks and Marcello returns to his role as publicity agent, as go-between between the parasitic paparazzi and their celebrity hosts. T

he final woman in his life lives only in the film's interlude, and in its ending; Paola is untouched by the corrupting influence of Rome, remaining innocent and angelic, her cryptic smile at the departing figure of an older Marcello in the film's finale as he wanders off across a beach at once a beautiful and downbeat moment. For, if Marcello truly has a love affair that lasts, it is with the opulence and power that his role as a "fixer", a publicity agent, himself a parasite feeding off the production of films and of celebrity, and with that great hive of rot that Rome has become. His intellectualism, his love of poetry, falls away, in the form of Steiner, who, in sharp contrast to the unattached Marcello, is married and, eventually kills his children and himself, unable to reconcile his intellectualism and his stable family life.

In following Rome's rot downward, so Marcello himself is corrupted-if he hasn’t been corrupt all along. His friendship group turn from being intellectuals, actresses and heiresses, to drag queens, ageing members of Rome's gay community, and fumbling inebriation replaces passion. Moreover, though, Rome has become as shallow, as vacuous, as base as Marcello-we see that, outside of the city's glittering lights, it is poor, run-down, but, in its moment of admittedly fake piety, that it has survived the rot, the inauthenticity of the beautiful marble, the artificiality of its post-Mussolini interior. Less Rome, Open City and more Rome, Open Sewer, beholden to celebrity, to surface level beauty. Underneath is nothing but rot, and death, and it is only in the film's final episode that Marcello comes face to face with this vanitas, both for himself, and the city he haunts.

Like Marcello, Rome has become unfaithful, rotten, and beneath the beauty, it is a moral desert, an underworld into which this modern-day Dante stumbles, only to never reappear. It towers, tottering, over Italian cinema, at once staggeringly beautiful, featuring career-best performances from some of the greatest actors of the 1960, and savage, pulling back Rome's very skin and surface to lay bare the emptiness below. It is not just a masterful portrait of its people and places, it is one of the greatest films ever made.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Next week, we stay with Federico Fellini, as the director explores the Rome of his childhood, and pays homage to its past beauty, in Roma

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