La dolce vita. Federico Fellini. 1960. ⚅
I must have seen this before? Right? But I can’t really recall it… This is the one with the fountain scene? I must have seen it… or perhaps I’ve just seen that scene, which is included in every documentary about Italian cinema.
Oh, yeah! Here’s the opening shot with the Christ statue! OK, I’ve seen this before. Sometime. Perhaps as a child?
[an hour passes]
Man, this is a gorgeous movie. It’s been beautifully restored:
Everything is so… Fellini. It’s like… my very conception of how a gorgeous, arty movie should be is based on Fellini, because I probably saw a couple of these movies as a child? They’re sort of dreamlike, and sort of heavy on symbolism, and very meta, and… just very, very pretty.
I love all the performers here, but Mastroianni in particular is something to behold. And Ekberg, of course, as the original manic pixie dream girl is irresistible.
[another hour passes]
This movie is delightfully vague. It sort of segues from one sitch to the next without any discernible plan, and I love that. I mean, I’m two hours in on this movie, and if you’d ask me to tell you what this movie was about I’d say… “er… Rome?”
I love the scenes with Mastroianni’s father out on the town. It’s so on point.
[the final hour passes]
Wow. That’s… a lot. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I did kind of expect that it would just go on in the same way until the end, and then everything got… intense and tragic.
This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.