1001 Movie Club - Dolce Vita, La (1960)

#369. La Dolce Vita (1960)

Why It's In The Book: "An epic about triviality, Federico Fellini’s portrait of a place and time captures perfectly the style and attitudes of Rome’s fashionable party folk during the summer of 1959, all the while condemning them for being such gorgeous parasites. The enduring strength of La Dolce Vita comes from the tension between viciously attacking a world whose excesses are beyond satire and the fascination it can’t help but feel for the mad parade of modern decadents. Like A Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Now, and Wall Street, this is a film that paradoxically set as many fashion styles as it set out to demolish, encouraging people to sit about cafés on the Via Veneto in an unironic attempt to emulate the sweet life. The expression paparazzi comes from the film character of Paparazzo, who epitomizes the swarm of insect-like photojournalists found around every passing celebrity, snapping away and jostling for the best place and the most exploitable shot." -1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Member Ratings

Michaël Parent - 10/10
"...La Dolce Vita was the film that Fellini made after he encountered the Italian Neo-Realist Antonioni. That it was his attempt to make a film like his Italian peer and that it restrained the best of him."
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Movie Guy Steve - 9/10
"...life might truly be sweet, but it's an empty sweetness. And that's the point."
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siochembio - 8.5/10
"No one is incidental in Fellini’s world – even his extras have enormous stories that they aren’t telling."
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Adolytsi - 8/10
"The film is at once a celebration and a send-up of the high-class celebrity life that paparazzi and journalists like our main character thrive on like flies over dead meat. It is a very playful film, and one that indulges in its subject matter as voraciously as it can."
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Nicolas Krizan - 8/10
"still alarmingly relevant after more than 50 years"
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Sunny D - 7/10
"It sucks to realize that your dad is gonna die soon and you’ll never have a real connection with him, it sucks to
feel tied to a person you don’t want to be with but who will literally kill themselves if you leave them, it sucks to realize no one in the world has life all figured out, I get it, I get it, I get it. Three hours of it all is just a bit much, however much heresy it might be for me to harbor that particular opinion."
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Squish - 6/10
"Telling, beautiful and on the pulse on all sides of the human spirit, [the Virgin Mary] scene could have been the entire film and I’d have loved it, but sadly it’s a blip of colour in the otherwise flat sweet-life vignettes we experience."
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Overall Rating: 8.1/10