Ryan McNeil
In some ways, the final Blind Spot selection of 2012 feels somewhat apropos.
There isn’t a whole lot of rhyme or reason to the order in which I watch the films I choose, with the exception of wanting to line up a horror classic with the week of Halloween. I watch what I watch based on whimsy and availability: WILD AT HEART for instance was bumped up the queue to take advantage of a screening. Inevitably, something has to land at the end of the list, and that something was Fellini’s classic LA DOLCE VITA.
The reason why this selection feels apropos, is because it feels like of all the films I have chosen for this year’s watchlist, it’s the one I needed to work up to – and likewise the one that seems to best lead in to next year’s Blind Spots, which are a bit more “Film Lit 201”. Like LA DOLCE VITA, I feel as though many of these films will require a bit more time, study, and consideration (which isn’t a bad thing). many of them will not be films I can watch the night before my homework is due, with the hopes of pounding out one thousand words by morning.
That’s my roundabout way of saying that I already want to revisit LA DOLCE VITA. So much so that I still haven’t returned the dvd to the shop I rented it from, even though it’s probably late by now.
LA DOLCE VITA isn’t so much one long story as it is a series of vignettes that a cluster of characters wander through a lush series of events. In some ways, it’s no small wonder that Fellini would follow this film with 8 1/2, as the two share a similar “loosely hinged” narrative. At the core of LA DOLCE VITA is Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a journalist who we follow through moments of style, loss, serenity, lust, indecision, and mortality.
The story is considered a series of individual chapters which don’t build up to a complete whole, but should instead be considered a loosely-related series of events…much like life when you think about it.
The unfortunate hiccup is that the format leaves one (or at least left me) slightly perplexed after first watch, and a little bit confused. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, if anything I am thankful for the sorts of films that leave me wanting to revisit them; they stand in stark contrast to the fast-food-franchises that so many of today’s biggest offerings embody.
At first watch, I can only claim to come away from LA DOLCE VITA with isolated impressions, the first of which is easily the character of Paparazzo. Within the context of the film, he feels almost like an extraneous character – the photographer who is usually around, but seldom doing anything of major importance besides capturing the glamorous social scene of Rome. Little could Fellini know that he was coining a phrase and branding an entire arm of future media. Indeed, the term “Paparazzi” stems back to this character and his vocation.
Of course, the amusing thing is that Paparazzo barely resembles the group of gossip journalists his name would inspire. He’s hitched his star to Marcello, and works with him to cover stories like the sighting of The Madonna, but primarily he makes his bones by constantly being around. He isn’t chasing the photos (the way his modern counterparts do), so much as he’s often in the right place at the right time.
As Paparazzo’s role in the film slid away, I found myself wondering what Fellini would have thought of the brand of media he helped name.
Another curious impression I was left with comes later in the film during a gathering in a beach house. During the scene, a character named Nadia begins an impromptu striptease that culminates with her writhing on the floor covered only by a mink. As Marcello tries to bend the party into a full-on orgy, catcalls starts coming for Nadia to ditch the mink.
You know how sometimes an idea can start-out sexy and easily spill over into icky? This is that sort of moment. It feels like that moment in BOOGIE NIGHTS when Little Bill Thompson’s wife is being fucked in the driveway of a pool party with a bunch of strangers standing around her and leering.
In a way the scene stands in stark contrast to one of the film’s most iconic moments: Sylvia’s dip in the Trevi Fountain. That moment plays with such beauty, life, energy, and whimsy. Not long after Sylvia arrived in Rome, she is so enchanted by everything she sees, that she feels like she must act on it with an impish display of impulse. By comparison, Nadia’s manner of acting out feels more carnal, ugly, and curiously sad.
Of course, just like comedy, sexiness is completely subjective. So while I found the scene to be on the distasteful, others may see it very differently.
I wasn’t able to soak up everything I wanted in LA DOLCE VITA, and given the time of year, I also wasn’t able to watch it a second time. However, I found it to be a fitting end to the Blind Spot series for 2012. It sent me rolling and tumbling through moment after moment, and just left me to figure things out for myself. It filled me with so many conflicting emotions, and left me with so much that I wish to consider.
Just like life – the good one, or otherwise.
As I close the book for 2012 on this series, I must admit that I am happy and proud with how it all shook down. Sure, some of the people who hoped to join me in the project weren’t able to make it through, but I already have a whole host of enthusiastic participants for next year…including some returning members! Not only did I fully enjoy the twelve films chosen – a surprising amount in some cases – but never once did the project feel like homework. Never once did I find that I had to force myself to watch a title, or stay with it. Every one of these blind spot entries was chosen as a film I’d never seen but always wanted to, and as such, I was able to ensure a certain amount of enthusiasm. Here’s hoping that enthusiasm will continue through the somewhat-more-challenging dozen I’ve chosen for 2013!
I intend to post my entries on the final Tuesday of every month. If you are participating, drop me an email (ryanatthematineedotca) when your post is up and I’ll make sure to link to your entry.
Here’s the round-up for December…
Steve Honeywell watched THELMA & LOUISE
Sean Kelly watched SCROOGE
Courtney Small watched RASHOMON
Dan Heaton watched FITZCARRALDO
I am with you on La Dolce Vita. I really wasn’t sure how I felt about it when I saw it, I guess I am still not sure. There were moments that I really appreciated and that made me think but on the other hand, there were also moments that really confused me, like Mastroianni meeting that woman on the beach in the end. I had no idea what was that about?
But I have had very similar experiences with almost every Fellini movie I saw. 8 1/2, Nights of Cabiria, La Strada. But then again, I have also experienced that all of these improve Immensely on Second watch. Maybe this will too. I haven’t given it a second watch yet.
Interesting that you mention LA STRADA, since that was one of the two Fellinin films I’ve seen that felt most linear (along with his screenplay for ROME, OPEN CITY).
In a way that shrug that Mastroianni gives at the end of the film is apropos: It’s as if he’s admitting that he didn’t get it either.
I think I’m gonna have to buy this one…
This remains my favorite Fellini film so far. It’s not an easy film to watch since the character of Marcello is a man who is just simply lost. He’s trying to find meaning in his life and in the end, realizes he just couldn’t escape anything. It’s kind of a defeating film but still captivating. I first saw in a theater in September of 2004 for a special screening. Truly a delight and I have the 3-disc box set from Koch Lorber that I paid $30 for.
For a while I was actually beginning to think that it was a film I just wasn’t meant to see, since it played three times at The Lightbox in 2011 and each of the three times I was thwarted from seeing it at the last minute.
Hopefully they’ll bring it back so I can give it a go on the big screen.
My first experience with La Dolce Vita was pretty similar to your own, even to the point of having rented it from a video store (on VHS no less) and not bringing it back because I felt compelled to revisit.
My initial screening, in the afternoon, left me cold. Up to this point I had been enamored of La Strada and especially Nights of Cabiria (which was my first Fellini and remains my favorite) but unethused with 8 1/2. La Dolce Vita seemed to fit in with that feeling that in later films, an increasingly more baroque Fellini had left behind the warm humanism I found so captivating in the earlier, more earthy movies with his wife.
Yet something stuck with me. Literally in the middle of the night I got up from bed, went downstairs, popped the video back in the player less than six hours after I’d finished my first disappointed viewing. And I watched the whole thing again, this time as if chasing that fleeting feeling of melancholy I detected beneath the movie’s cynical, decadent surface that hadn’t quite engaged me (slight sidenote to filmmakers: if you’re gonna do “decadent” be warned, it dates real fast).
Since then I’ve seen it as a “hinge” film in Fellini’s career, not just in the obvious stylistic, narrative ways but in terms of its sensibility. It is moving toward the more worldly (and innerworldly), masculine concerns of later Fellinis but still attached to a kind of bittersweet innocence, even as it waves goodbye to it.
Which brings me to SDG’s point: that, I think, is what the ending is “about”, Marcello having finally become unable to communicate with the rather naive yet deeply-felt romanticism that once powered him along, a feeling already nearly gone by the beginning of the movie but still lingering in his desire to experience and express true beauty. I view that blonde girl as a stand-in for Giuletta Masina in the earlier movies, waving across an unbridgeable divide from the filmmaker Fellini was to the filmmaker he would become. La Dolce Vita moves me because it is a story about losing “that feeling”, something anyone who’s ever grown up, no matter how far from the sweet life of Rome’s boulevards, can relate to.
Wow dude – sometimes your comments feel like posts all their own and make me feel like reconsidering a lot of what I already wrote! I’ll probably print this out to refer to when I revisit the movie.
You’re the second person to mention NIGHTS OF CABRIA, I think that might have to be my next visit to Fellini’s Italy…
That would be a good decision for sure – Giuletta Masina is just wonderful in that, and some scenes are just so powerful (like the hypnotism gone wrong – talk about social situations gone excruciatingly awkward – that one takes the cake, and is on You Tube if you want to sample the film first). Another early Fellini I really like is I Vitelloni, which definitely formed a template for American Graffiti, Diner, and the like. It’s forms a nice bookend with Amarcord, Fellini’s later, more flamboyant take on youthful restlessness in a small town. And also, come to think of it, I Vitelloni is a kind of prequel to La Dolce Vita, with its main character much as we’d imagine Marcello being before he goes off to the big city and becomes disillusioned. In fact that film ends (not even really a spoiler, as we’re expecting it all along) with that character boarding a train headed out of the provinces. I feel like there are certain directors whose films, taken together and in order, tell a kind of overarching story – Fellini is definitely one of them, moving from romantic curiosity through worldly disillusionment and eventually to masterfully baroque self-exploration (Bergman and Kubrick are other director like this I think but that’s another long comment/post haha).
I agree with your thoughts on the strip-scene – it was like, “funny idea, but DON’T do it!”. I don’t think anyone found it sexy, but who knows…
La Dolce Vita was an interesting watch, as it was different from anything I had seen before… as you said, it’s a lot like life.
Although it was a big selling point at the time (I think La Dolce Vita actually made the U.S. box office top 10 that year, pretty rare for a foreign film then as now), I think the striptease was actually supposed to be more “icky” than “sexy” – it definitely shows how shallow and vapid Marcello has become, and the whole scene conveys a sense not of genuine erotica but phony playacting as if everything that’s happening is going down not for the sake of pleasure or exploration, but out of a sense of bored, immature “edginess.” The characters just have nothing better to do, or can’t think of anything better. Punctuated by the homeowner popping in at the end of the scene, and making everyone (especially the divorcee stripping) uncomfortable – even though he himself could care less.
So it’s good to know, as Joel said, that the strip scene is supposed to play icky. As I think back on that, it’s pretty impressive, since it can be tricky to pull off a scene that involves that much sex but isn’t meant to titillate.
I think I’ve been at more than a few parties and walked away from moments like that…you both have too I’d imagine?
Yeah, well kind of… I haven’t ever seen anyone really stripping until they were completely naked, but there’s always that moment when some people think they need to “show what they got” – and most of the times it’s never as much fun as in theory.
Yeah, same for me. Never been privvy to someone completely getting their kit off, but like you, I’ve shook my head and thought “That’s going a lot differently in that person’s head” and left to get something from the other room.
Guess the takeaway is to do what we can to make sure that person making the spectacle isn’t us, right?
Definitely, I’d never do something like that… at least I hope so!
I’m amazed and delighted that you were able to stick with the project all year. Your work ethic shames me. I just wrote another defeated post about how I was only able to see 3 of my dozen this year. Hopefully I can figure out a way to do this better next year. But bravo to you, and glad you enjoyed the Fellini. I threw in my blu-ray of 8 1/2 yesterday but was only able to watch 20 minutes before Brooke had to concentrate on something and asked me to turn it off. 🙁
Brooke made you turn off 8 1/2? Geez – tough times! I made Lindsay’s life difficult last night as she tried to work while I was watching COMPLIANCE!
Don’t get too down on yourself. As much as you might not have been able to scratch all twelve off the list, it was still a great idea in the first place…one that many more people are latching on to in 2013! I might have completed the idea, but it was still your idea, and I think there’s a lot to be said for that. Not only that, but it’s not like you had a quiet year overall anyway. Chin up sir!
Thanks, man. I needed that.