Word: fellini
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...those who wish an appropriate English title for La Dolce Vita, I suggest: "Everyman his own voyeur: an expose in five orgies." Episodic and long, this latest Fellini effort contains brilliant camera work, but little else to recommend itself...
...Fellini picks at the scabrous center of Rome's cafe society and uncovers nymphomania, homosexuality, and the rest of Decadence's retinue. Caught up by the momentum of his careening world, Marcello Mastroianni divides his time as a young publicist between sensational events, effete parties, and various bedrooms. Marcello is supposed to be struggling, some might say having an "identity crisis": should he be a serious writer or continue churning out his gossip column? After his friend Steiner, an intellectual and would-be writer, murders his children and commits suicide, Marcello abandons his former ambitions and assumes the role...
...depraved spectacle after another. Individually these sordid vignettes succeed quite well, but, taken together, they do not comprise any kind of dramatic growth. Marcello's interlude with Steiner not only is unconvincing, but a bore in addition. If the funeral pace was intentional--to contrast with the orgies--Fellini erred in trying to express boredom by boring his audience. Although the Steiner episode should ostensibly have served as the keystone of his plot, Fellini did not shape it clearly enough to provide motivation for Steiner's suicide: he leaves us with only the orgy to fall back on. Without...
From the startling first scene on (a statue of Christ suspended from a helicopter flies over Rome), Fellini's use of the city itself casts an eerie tenseness over every event. Stark white, modern buildings rise like phantoms everywhere...
This macabre and sordid tone prepares for the final obscenity: Dawn breaks over the Saturnalia and the revellers run down through a forest to the seashore, where fishermen have just netted an enormous, fleshy sting ray. This could have been a powerful, almost mythic ending if Fellini had not ruined it with a phony conversation between Marcello and an innocent young girl...