Youth, beauty, love, fame – all of these fade, as La Dolce Vita so poignantly reveals, but thankfully the movies never do. Director Federico Fellini’s epic account of our endless chase of “the sweet life” looks as shimmering and feels as vital as ever – even though its ironic message is that the party always comes to an end. Italian great Marcello Mastroianni gave his defining performance as Marcello, a celebrity journalist scurrying around the heels of the rich and famous. He’s begging for crumbs of happiness from people whose fame and riches haven’t been able to make them happy, a fact they all try to hide partly by wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night. Marcello’s cyclical journey – from nighttime highs to morning emptiness and back again – is chronicled by Fellini in some of the cinema’s most famous sequences. The movie opens with the image of a helicopter towing a statue of Jesus over Rome and later offers the iconic sight of statuesque Swedish actress Anita Ekberg, as an improbably statuesque Swedish actress Marcello wants to interview, impulsively wading into the city’s Trevi Fountain. La Dolce Vita parallels celebrity worship and religious worship throughout, making it a prescient precursor to today’s celebrity-obsessed culture (the term paparazzi comes from the name of a photographer Marcello works with, Paparazzo). Yet mostly it’s a personal story of one man finally realizing what most of us know but aren’t willing to admit: That you can stay up as late as you want, but there is still no cure for the morning.
