La Dolce Vita [The Good Life] (1960)

(On DVD, September 2019) At nearly three hours of a nearly plotless movie about a nearly unlikable protagonist, writer-director Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita can be a trying viewing experience. It’s a collage of scenes with minimal narrative connective tissue, a lot of supporting characters that come and go without resolution, a decidedly depressing outlook on the search for meaning and enough ambiguity and loose ends to frustrate anyone who thinks that cinema is a primarily story-driven art form. That used to describe me almost perfectly a few years ago, but I’ve grown far more relaxed in my outlook for a while, striving to find pleasure even in movies that would have exasperated me not too long ago. La Dolce Vita does manage to remain interesting despite having been made into cliché—much of what it did to shock audiences back in 1960 (it was banned in a few countries) has been remade, redone, and re-examined (often far more interestingly, sometimes even by Fellini himself). We’re not exactly shocked anymore by a protagonist going from woman to woman, adventure to adventure, excess after excess in search of existential fulfillment. We’re not so shocked by backless dresses, form-fitting bras or prudish stripteases filmed to avoid showing nudity. There are scores of meandering films chronicling a few days in the life of an erring protagonist. But La Dolce Vita remains the ur-example of the form for a reason—it’s at its best when it jumps the bounds of strict Italian neorealism to spend some time in Fellini’s expressionist imagination. It features an impressive number of striking women: Anita Ekberg certainly makes an impression as a movie star in the film’s most purely enjoyable moment. But above all, La Dolce Vita features Marcello Mastroianni, world-class-cool despite playing a borderline reprehensible character. We can coast a long time on Mastrantonio’s charm and the odd visuals that the film throws at us in the middle of the protagonist’s search for meaning. It doesn’t really lead anywhere but a melancholic sense of missed opportunities, but it’s an interesting trip. This being said: I’ve seen the film, all 174 minutes of it. I don’t need to do so again anytime soon.