La Dolce Vita | When in Rome

My train pulled into the Eternal City at four minutes past four on Thursday the 19th of September. It was my brother’s birthday. Such introduction cannot compare to a helicopter ride above an ancient aqueduct, with a statue of Christ dangling from its undercarriage, but it can all too well encapsulate just what makes the Romani life that much sweeter. Rome is a city of both the past and the present; decorated with busts of conquering Emperors and with statues of liberating Kings, and yet features a modernity that connects the brushstrokes of renaissance with the efficiency of futurism. As a first-time tourist, the Italian capital blew my mind. I was serenaded with monuments round every corner and by cathedrals that reached the cloudless blue sky; my appetite sated, with the thin-based Romana pizza al taglio serving as a late breakfast and at night, jazz clubs illuminated by velvet red and empty cobble streets where whispers become echoes. Was I experiencing the authentic, Neo-realist Italian lifestyle or instead wrapped up in a free-wheeling fantasia?

‘A kind of jungle, warm, quiet, where you can hide well’.

I can’t argue that I intentionally hid in Rome, rather I was immersed and engulfed, but perhaps I simply don’t carry the same gravitas and confidence as Mastroianni’s finest character. A gossip columnist, Marcello Rubini doesn’t write of the socio-economic politics of the world but rather chronicles the culture of knock-off movie stars, washed-up playboys and ailing aristocrats; all the while conflating his musings with… well, muses. Anouk Aimee’s Maddalena wears cat-eye sunglasses inside and yet, her presence is somehow even cooler. A femme fatale, with a typical tinge of melancholy for the Parisian - her luminous skin competes with the rims of the Cadillac convertible she drives, in who can best reflect the moon. Maddalena is far too good for Marcello, as most women are, but in a sense the she has given the tabloid writer a romantic and statusy hand-out. Rubini perhaps belongs amongst the aristocrat class but, only as a voyeur or a scribe. His tailored suit, perfect hair and midnight-black sunglasses put him on a pedestal compared to Paparazzo, but not one high enough to truly amount to anything substantial. In essence, that is the personal and narrative dilemma of La Dolce Vita and Marcello Rubini respectively. The first night of our time with Marcello ends in the dilapidated house of a hospitable prostitute, forever flooded and with walls of plank wood. For the dissatisfied Maddalena who dreams of her own island, and yet her self-confessed problem is too much money, a brush with poverty is almost an exciting vacanza. Marcello doesn’t fit in either, but where does he? The presence of Anouk Aimee’s heiress litters La Dolce Vita, but her next significant appearance not only almost bookends the film but places her and Marcello in the polar opposite of settings - a wealthy soiree at a castle in Bassano Romano, the north of Lazio. Much like before, they meet again by chance. Maddalena lists off names and couples, with their corresponding scandals, as if she was speaking off the record. Marcello wouldn’t dare let this go to print, for it would ostracise him from the echelons he wishes to live amongst. Her voice exists from a direction that he cannot decipher - taunting him with false promises and idealisms, until distracted by a patrician peer and leaving Marcello in a chamber of echoes. Maddalena’s avowal of love, before her instant betrayal, depicts sex as a noblesse oblige. The journalist joins the wider party, searching for ghosts in an old castle and attempting to mingle, though to no avail. “This is the first time I’ve seen the dawn,” a gowned woman remarks as she and a tuxedoed Marcello wander onto the castle grounds, passing the matriarch attending mass alongside a priestly procession. Fellini’s most famous scene, and the reason why one can no longer bathe in Roman fountains I assume, is Anita Ekburg’s iconic wade through the shallow waters of the Trevi. The Swedish actress’ interpretation of Sylvia, the travelling movie star who’s Italian is limited to Ciao, is the dream woman of our protagonist. His fiancee Emma knows it and fiercely expresses her caution over Sylvia’s buxom, luring purity in close contact with Marcello’s malaise, but more on her later. Ekburg herself was a European starlet, but perhaps an actress who fared better on the poster than in the actual picture. If Jayne Mansfield was a ‘poor man’s Monroe’, then Ekburg doesn’t even compare to the former. However, as Ebert so delicately put it, “Ekburg might not be much of an actress, but she was the only person who could have played herself”.

‘You are everything! You are the first woman on the first day of creation. You are mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, earth, home’.

So exclaims Marcello, as he dances and falls for a facade of fame. Like her dance partner, and later chauffeur, Sylvia is in search of the so-called ‘sweet life’ as her Roman odyssey isn’t at all eternal. In a scene reminiscent of Roman Holiday’s finale, though without the rigid structure of royalty or the Hays code, the Scandinavian star is bombarded with questions ranging from her thoughts on Italian cuisine to what she wears to bed each night - in which the answer is nothing but two drops of French perfume. Of course, this surface-level interrogation delves only into the most trivial, and doesn’t truly get under the skin of the travelling movie star. Similarly, no journalist or paparazzi can quite keep up with Sylvia as she rather quickly gallops to the top of St Peter’s. Marcello follows after her, and so joins her for the night ahead. This famous sequence deserves its plaudits, as Nino Rota’s delicate score combines with Fellini’s camera to create a true spectacle. On my travels, whilst walking home from a bar in Rome at two ante meridian, I came across the Trevi fountain and my mind immediately wandered to Sylvia and Marcello. If only it was as empty for me as it was for them. To view Sylvia as that of a divine goddess would in-turn suggest that her enticing of Marcello into the fountain with her, almost reflects a baptism into the sort of hedonistic and romantic spirit that permits an ignorance of Roman customs and traditions. Sylvia discovers the fountain and subsequently wades in its waters through ignorance, but Marcello follows suit out of pure lovelorn compulsion. He should know better to respect his city’s monuments, but also not to worship false prophets. Within the fountain’s fall, Sylvia pouts a statue’s pose in which he cannot even comprehend to touch. It’s too surreal, as night becomes day within a single, startling cut. Marcello isn’t even allowed the dream.

‘The day you understand that you love Marcello more than he does, you'll be happy’

Fellini’s harsh cut between the final shot of Maddelena's first segment and our introduction to Marcello’s troubled fiancee Emma holds the desired effect. There is much pain and tragedy within the confines of La Dolce Vita, but few as consistent as the woes of Yvonne Furneaux’s character. A beautiful woman in her own right, with eyes of onyx, Emma is rendered practically drab and undesirable. She offers Marcello the stability of marriage, the possibility of a family and, most crucially, unconditional love but it’s not enough for Marcello who views his relationships and friendships along the lines of status. Like her spouse, Emma too is enchanted by intellectualism but more so by a happy domesticity, an existence entirely harmonious with an intellectual writer husband, and one that could easily have existed in the pre-war world. Marcello cannot stomach a life without proximity to power and pleasure, hence Emma’s declarations are mocked and dismissed. In her analysis, Kaly Cerqueira writes that “[Marcello’s] impulses drives him to wear sunglasses night and day, as if afraid of the choice he’ll be forced to make if he looks upon reality unencumbered”. The very same indecision sees him string the hopeless Emma along, the only woman who truly loves him because she’s willing to put up with the impulses of her fiancee. On an isolated road, Marcello and Emma argue in his sports car. A towering stage light illuminates the night sky, and bears down upon the couple who exchange passages of fury. She claims no other woman will love him like she does; he retorts that he cannot stand her smothering, motherly persona. She leaves the car, which he drives off into the night and away from the deserted road. Within a dissolve, dawn breaks and he returns as she idly waits. Not a word is spoken, and yet their relationship is perfectly described. Perhaps the most significant woman in La Dolce Vita however appears in only two scenes, and yet her importance must not be understated. At a remote seaside restaurant, Marcello spends the afternoon working on his novel and meets Paola, a young waitress from Perugia who can’t stop humming to whatever the jukebox played last. Likened to an angle in an Umbrian painting, Paola presents a purity unseen throughout the rest of Fellini’s film. Ekburg’s Sylvia may be portrayed as a goddess, but the sexual undertones of the interactions with her character are thankfully not replicated in Marcello’s conversation with the Umbrian child waitress. It is easy to forget that Fellini, who’s works including and post-La Dolce Vita are extravagant affairs that evoke hedonism, surrealism and perhaps even Shakespearean fantasy, got his break in the Neo-realist vacuum that dawned upon post-war late-forties Italy. With I Vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957), together with writing credits on two of Rossellini’s post war trilogy, the roots of working class perspectivism is ever present within the oeuvre of the director whose family were Romagnol peasants.

As La Dolce Vita draws to a close, we are met with a Marcello with grey in his hair and greed in his heart. He promises to the other members of his loose orgy-cum-afterparty that he can provide a platform to shoot them to the stars, though one can only intelligently guess that his greatest brush with stardom remains his night with Sylvia. Dawn breaks and the party heads outside, and after the discovery of a sea creature upturned on the beach, Marcello sees Paola again across a small inlet. She shouts to him and gestures but he cannot understand, and lightly shrugs his shoulders in indifference before turning to follow his crowd. If Paola is the neo-real then Marcello, particularly at the end of La Dolce Vita, is indicative of the eclipsing Italian fantasy that has forgotten it’s smaller, poorer and depressive characters and now favours the hedonistic but exciting mess of the late twentieth century. Fellini’s Palme D’or winner is then presumptively the stake that was driven through the heart of Italian neo-realism which had slept-walked through the fifties and was alas replaced by a newer, post-modern expression that reenergised cinema, but stole it from the grasp of the proletariat.

From ordinary, to extravagant. From sour, to sweet.

Written By Harry J. Wormald | IG: @harryjwormald