What can you say about a movie filled with internal poetry and external strong dialogues through out the tenure of its screen time? It is sheer pleasure to watch a movie which is antique in its authenticity and far ahead in its content. To start a movie with an amazing helicopter shot carrying Jesus Statue is the instant message all the viewers would get the grandiose and the effort the material is going to contain in the next nearly three hours.This is the movie which takes immense patience to sit through for sure. The initial 30 minutes feels like an hour to sit through. But the true fact is that the characterization takes those thirty minutes. That is when there are subtleties in the personality of Marcello (Marcello Mastrainni) which is getting sketched. It does not mean that there is a detailed example of how he behaves, but it explains his job nature. The job of being a reporter, which involves invading and exploring the privacy of famous and interesting people with the advantage of intimacy. The characters which surrounds him is consistently educating on what life is and of all what he is and how needs to get himself into the reality of his originality. Every one knows he is in a continuous process of finding his true identity including himself. It is weird that the earlier movie I watched in this Ebert Film Festival, “Come Early Morning” deals with the same. I guess most of the identity search movies will have the influence of this master piece.
The film has multiple layers of abstraction bonded with realism and poetry in it. The particular sequence which marks the movie’s high point is the party with Marcello’s friend Mr. Steiner (Alain Cuny). That is where most of the truth of life is being clearly explained with clarity. It gets the clarity due to the lucidity of Mr. Steiner. It seems as if he has lived his life for full and it is the matter of time to pass it on to some one else who is struggling from the same trauma as him. It seems that he is the perfectly stable character in the movie but the audiences are struck with his demise. When the moment passes, even though there is this sense of shock in them, the shock is overcome by the reasonability that this character definitely showed those characteristics. It is at that point of time that the viewers realize that this is what he meant, quite a while ago to Marcello. In fact this is one more frustration and agony adds upon on Marcello on not able to notice those at the right moments. This is one sequence which needs so much observation and concentration to entirely get what the director Federico Fellini is portraying. The whole movie is filled in with these tons of instance which needs enormous energy and work any one needs to spend to completely grasp those. I guess that is the reason I felt the exhaustion in myself around the end of the movie. It is of no surprise.
I have been constantly enthralled by the technicality of Akira Kurosawa’s movies. This is my first Fellini movie and I am dumbfounded by the technology which has been employed in this. The initial helicopter shot, which marks the definition of the enormity of this film, is the perfect example. The screenplay and editing is another achievement in the same department. The film is the different fragments of Marcello’s life and the characters he meets. It is sometimes disjoint and sometimes intimately connected. This connection of disjoints has been mingled with delicacy of art and costume to provide the flagrance in this black and white piece. Thinking about it, I guess Fellini would have opted for black and white even if he would have shot this movie in 2007. The reason is that the colourful energy it brings out of this binary toned picture consistently reeks out so much of it which may have been an overload in real colour toned images.
The film discusses right from sex to the superstitious beliefs of people. One moment we see the beauty of the women and next moment is the dissection of religion in subtle sequences. The diversity of the contents in this movie is beyond words. The technicality of concentrating on the surrounding characters of the protagonist and thereby explaining his reality is something even the directors of this age could not possibly depict it with accuracy. We meet the father, friends, lovers and unexplained enemies of Marcello in different segments. Each segment is an encounter of Marcello with his strange and distantly intimate acquaintance. At the end of every segment, he gets closer to reality and far from his personality. His search for his soul is endless. The film is the various phases of his incidents and accidents which try to mould him to be the person every one wants him to be and him as a person want to be too. The movie of course does not lead him to that destiny. This is perplexed Marcello and this is the unique film making of Fellini.
“La Dolce Vita” definitely tests the patience but with intelligence. I did not feel the pinch of it until the final party scene. I felt there were some easy five minutes which could have been eliminated. But I guess during some point in my life, when I watch it again, there may be a birth of another philosophy out of that five minutes sequence. The ending cannot be better than poetry. Connecting the first and final scene with signs and sounds of nature and leaving it to the perception of the viewers is the moment I will be cherishing for a long time. Since it is the perception, I will finish this review with mine. In the initial sequence when Marcello talks from the helicopter to the women on the top of the building, the women understand what he says but he does not get what they are trying to say to him. In the final sequence, the same happens in different situation and this time Marcello is still not able to understand the sign language of the opposite sex. It is a direct depiction of how he never gets the opposite sex. He mesmerizes them with his charisma but never quite understands or translates it into a long lasting relationship.
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