La Dolce Vita. 1960. Italy . Directed by Federico Fellini. Screenplay by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi. With Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux. In Italian; English subtitles. 4K digital restoration by Cinecittà, Cineteca di Bologna and CSC - Cineteca Nazionale. 173 min.
It was in La dolce vita, thanks in no small part to their working together for the first time, that Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni hit on the thing that would govern their success both in art and at the box office for the rest of their lives. At play was a paradox of the so-called modern condition: a fantasy of the sweet life—the illusion of riches, depravity, and sex on demand—so intoxicating that audiences could scarcely discern the “melancholy and postcoital disenchantment” (David Thomson) and eventually outright boredom that went into manufacturing such images. As Andrew Sarris would observe, “Fellini undertook La dolce vita to provide a Dantean vision of the modern world as viewed from the top instead of the bottom…. Confident of their ultimate righteousness, many spectators would like to slide along the infernal surfaces of fur and chrome before regaining their moral footing…. For Fellini, libertinism is not genuine liberty, but an unfortunate reaction to repression.”