Movie review, continued from Installment 2
In the 1960 “La Dolce Vita,” Rome, a generation after the most horrific war in human history, is a timeless hedonistic Arcadia and we are shown a cross-section of this sultry South European megalopolis in near-endless sequences of insuppressible pleasure-seeking bacchanalia from one end of the movie to the other.
Even a deracinated statue of Christ, suspended by cables, is unceremoniously and gruffly flown by helicopter across the vast, sprawling pious seat of Roman Catholicism in the film’s opening sequence.
Instead of being an object of religious reverence, the statue becomes the centerpiece of curiosity for young women sunbathing on the roof of an apartment complex and therefore an opportunity for pickup lines shouted at the girls from the second, pursuing news media helicopter crew, who decide to hover above the bikini-clad temptresses for a minute or two to try to get their phone numbers, somehow through the chopper’s whirring roar.
All this reduces what looks like Christ blessing Rome as he flies over the city to a cruel joke. The initial image of Christ rising by helicopter is fearfully compelling and impressive, but as the sequence continues, it becomes difficult to deny it is simply comic, possibly evincing feelings of delicious and guilty embarrassment from the viewer. Thus, the film plays off our hypocrisy.
But Fellini isn’t taking swipes at religion, but at those who would use it hypocritically, like sex, for personal gain.
Indeed, in the film, religious ecstasy itself resembles an unhinged orgy of crazed fornicators, with God’s grace the object of their rapine. Fellini is asking: Where does pure greed grown of ignorance, vanity, and egotistical, narrow-minded selfishness end and sincere communion with God and desire for salvation begin?
This flying Christ image introduces the crisis that plays through the entire 3 hours of the film, in which the question of morality itself is at stake – the dilemma of choosing between good and evil when the pleasures of evil can be so tempting, gratifying and delicious, but so obviously ephemeral, while good provides no panacea for the pain and tragedy that define life itself.
Here is Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” except without the bizarre grotesqueness and supernatural deformity the partakers of sin have brought upon themselves, but every human being in “La Dolce Vita” is beautiful, garbed in high style, fashionable and casual chic and glamour, from quotidian street prostitutes and low-level gigolo-like tabloid photographers to artists, poets, the bourgeoisie, heiresses, aristocrats and, of course, voluptuous love (sex)-goddess movie divas.
The outside is all élan; the inside, a hapless, pointless void.
From parties to festive nights out to loosely formal gatherings and spontaneous fetes, with few exceptions, human figures fueled by youth, alcohol, lust, and vanity, even in older age, pulse and undulate in ceaseless permutations of sensuality and desire.
But the sex this behavior leads to is natural, innocent, and beautiful. It is at the bifurcation of sex purely for pleasure and sex leading to true love, happiness and familial bliss where Fellini separates “The Good Life” he depicts throughout the movie, the ceaseless and vain pursuit of carnal and other pleasures, from The Good Life he only hints at, but which practically none in the movie achieve.
The one who is shown as clearly having attained this state, Steiner, the main character’s good friend, kills his own two children and commits suicide.
The main character, the rakishly handsome Marcello, played by the rakishly handsome Marcello Mastroianni, a high-life journalist who for obvious reasons cannot help indulging in all the sexual opportunities laid at his feet by beautiful and highly desirable women, is naturally thrown for a loop. If this is how it ended for someone (Steiner) who for Marcello had been a possible ideal to emulate, then the fast, easy life among jet-setting glitterati would now certainly have the greater pull.
And it does pull him, like a lulling narcotic tide, out to older age, increasing irrelevance, and oblivion.
Often, Marcello is accompanied by a tabloid photographer, Paparazzo, together with more cheerful, congenial and aggressive ilk of his kind, from where we get the word paparazzi, working in a natural symbiosis with the journalist.
For this is the world, finally, made by man, quite the one we suffer today and the reason why things like enduring love and happiness go wrong or never come to be. It is man’s work, a vast, covering, and pitiless media mobile, contrived of artifice, sensation, and glitter, devoid of true feeling, shallow, vapid, and heartless. Life is only skin-deep; the only thing that counts is the moment; surface – easy, flat, visible – is preferred to essence – deeper, more complex, and profound. Sense is replaced by sensation. The journalist feasts, and the photographers’ feeding frenzy follows.
At the end of the movie, dawn has broken and leftover stragglers from an all-night party they instigated at the elite seaside home of one of Marcello’s friends head for the beach, where fishermen are netting in a large, stingray-like sea monster. In awe, some of the partygoers comment that maybe they should buy it – again, money, media, sensation; even this ugly dead thing pulled out of the sea is a celebrity.
In the beginning, Christ is flown over Rome. In the end, a sea monster is dragged out of the sea onto barren sand. Years have passed and Marcello has visibly aged. Unable to settle down, he’s still up to his old antics, which he now realizes have no meaning. He is wearing a white smoking jacket, but he is sullied. In the movie’s first restaurant scene, he is in a black tux but appears pretty clean.
These kinds of details, symbols, metaphors, ironies, and paradoxes can be picked out of the film and analyzed ad infinitum. This is where Manny Face breaks down and can’t go on no more, except I’m better looking than Marcello Mastroianni ever was. Also, see the erotic Anita Ekberg wade half-naked in the Trevi Fountain with her big tits and hot seductive build. Alone, it’s worth the price of admission. That should have been me in there with her. But I’ve had more women like that than I can count, so it’s not that big of a loss.
When it comes to films, Manny Face talks pretty good. I wrote this myself. But beyond that, everything changes. As long as I do what I got to do good. As for the rest, I don’t care.
Manny Face, April 1, 2013