La Dolce Vita (1960)
Directed by Federico Fellini
Episodic journey of journalist Marcello who struggles to find his place in the world, torn between the allure of Rome's elite social scene and the stifling domesticity offered by his girlfriend, all the while searching for a way to become a serious writer.
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What critics compared La Dolce Vita to
The Italian title for Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is La Grande Bellezza, which much more closely evokes its main source of inspiration: the wondrous Federico Fellini opus La Dolce Vita.
Federico Fellini is an obvious touch point here: Sorrentino nods to both the corrosive hedonism of La Dolce Vita and the emotional paralysis of 8½, but his sensuous images outdo even the master’s.
This is Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), narrator and subject of The Great Beauty , who knows too well that he’s been living in a reminiscence of La Dolce Vita and seems to have accepted it with wry but weary resignation.
In blatant reference to La dolce vita, The Great Beauty is an apt if lazily postmodern response to Fellini’s question: how can we convert nihilism from an existential plague into a decent way of life?
The story of Jep’s plush detachment from the real world, and the crisis of soul he’d have if he could be certain he had a soul, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is an utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty that evokes Fellini’s La Dolce Vita by way of Baz Luhrmann.
Writer/director Paolo Sorrentino's ("Il Divo," "This Must Be the Place") latest has been described as an homage to "La Dolce Vita," but this film is more ambitious, the filmmaker not only preserving a cultural moment in time as experienced by a bon vivant journalist, but expressing the man's interior thoughts cinematically, a jaded man's ability to still experience the glories of life amidst a social circle defined by its depraved snobbery, ostentation and gossip.
There are whiffs of “La Dolce Vita,” which Chazelle’s film evokes through its manufactured glamour and melancholy sex appeal, and also “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which “Babylon” channels throughout its go-for-broke first hour (while also borrowing half of its cast).
"Babylon" nods to celluloid classics – from “Singin’ in the Rain” to “A Star Is Born” to “La Dolce Vita.”
Chazelle takes heavy inspiration from Singin’ in the Rain , La Dolce Vita , Boogie Nights , and The Wolf of Wall Street , going as far as entirely recreating scenes with a contemporary, dirty twist.
Chazelle has said that he studied a number of movies in this paean to cinema—the production notes list examples as disparate as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007).
If The Great Beauty was Paolo Sorrentino’s extravagant homage to La Dolce Vita — with nods also to 8½ and Roma — The Hand of God is the Italian Oscar winner’s Amarcord .
At first, The Hand of God seems like an echo of the lusty nostalgia of Fellini’s Amarcord , just as The Great Beauty was his attempt to bring La Dolce Vita into Rome of the 21st century.
The Great Beauty was dismissed by some as essentially a remake of La Dolce Vita (which was, after all, its point); but this coming-of-age reminiscence is effectively Sorrentino’s personal blend of Amarcord and I Vitelloni .
Sorrentino has often courted comparison to Fellini, with 2013’s The Great Beauty (read review) playfully imbued with the energy of an 8½ (1963) or La Dolce Vita (1960).
The person who sensed that attraction most keenly, of course, was Fellini, and that is why “The Hand of God” wrestles with his legacy; Marchino auditions for a Fellini production, surrounded by exotic hopefuls, and the sight of a huge chandelier, its blaze undimmed, lying aslant on the floor of a half-deserted house would have suited “La Dolce Vita” (1960).
For Sorrentino, whose surreal flourishes, particularly the “La Dolce Vita”-esque “The Great Beauty,” have drawn Fellini comparisons, this is his “Amarcord.”
This is not Tennessee Williams' "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" or Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" (although one of the most famous scenes from that film is restaged here).
Wells assumes the audience’s ignorance of all things Italian, and as such any scene with Lindsay Duncan’s Katherine (an American with delusions of Anita Ekberg) engaging La Dolce Vita or Nights of Cabiria feels more condescending than helpful.
But there's also Lindsay Duncan as Katherine, an eccentric 50-ish Englishwoman who has, unluckily for the locals, transplanted herself to Italy, where she swans about in apish imitation of Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita."
This culminates in a well-done homage to the Trevi Fountain scene from Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" that is striking.
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La bella Italia, La Dolce Vita – it’s all on display in this glorious Grand Tour, full of good friends and good food and, most of all, full of laughter.
Brydon of course has his Godfather ’s, Coogan waxes fondly about Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (with the always hounded celeb reminding us that it’s the film where the term “paparazzi” was created), and then there is Coogan’s personal assistant Emme (Claire Keelan) who continuously references Roman Holiday , the ultimate Italian fantasy film for women as The Godfather is to men.
Among the many made-in-Italy films referenced in this movie (including William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday” and Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”), the most pertinent is John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” – another lunatic comedy improvised on the go.
The scenes of driving in Rome invite chat about La Dolce Vita and Roman Holiday.
But about two-thirds of the way through, someone notes that some people think La Dolce Vita is a celebration of Italian jet-set living, when actually, it's a scathing criticism of its ultimate emptiness.
The film’s Italian-language segments play like vague retreads of Fellini (one of Allen’s favourite directors) – the paparazzi swarming Benigni’s character are straight out of “La Dolce Vita”, while the country couple led astray by big-city temptation is a nod to the Italian director’s first film, “The White Sheik” – only without the wit, lyricism and undercurrent of despair.
The four disconnected stories in the film seem at moments to nod to the Italian New Wave (if more to Fellini's popular La Dolce Vita than to Antonioni's internal L'Avventura), but never in a way that feels particularly thought through.
Alec Baldwin's advice-giving phantom recalls Bogie in Allen's "Play It Again, Sam"; Penélope Cruz's kooky hooker resembles characters in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" and "Mighty Aphrodite"; and Benigni's everyman stalked by paparazzi is a shoutout to Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
"Paparazzi" is an Italian word derived from a photographer's name in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
Now, in To Rome with Love, he naturally highlights the Colosseum and the Spanish Steps; and in a more resonant moment, he shows us a flirting couple at the Fontana di Trevi, where Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg splashed about in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, more than 50 years ago.
While Fred is happy to read the obituaries, claiming he likes to catch up on his friends, top of Elsa’s bucket list is to dance in the same fountain in Rome as Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita.
But the film smothers the pair with cutesy touches (Elsa is obsessed with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita , especially the iconic scene in which Anita Ekberg frolics in the Trevi Fountain), many of which are lifted directly from the original but register as even cringier in this Anglo version.
When first we see her, she’s in bed watching La Dolce Vita and daydreaming she’s in a world created by Federico Fellini.
The most contrived plot element centers around Elsa's obsession with Fellini's La Dolce Vita.
Michael Radford's romantic comedy Elsa & Fred is a remake of Marcos Carnevale's Spanish-language film of the same name, and it also retains the original's obsession with La Dolce Vita.
Elsa never stops moving or talking, most often about her favorite fantasy, a famous scene in Frederico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.”
The closest comparison to Jay Kelly I could think of is the more anarchic films of Federico Fellini, such as La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, where the Italian director started to wrestle with his own success.
Never does the material reach the heights of truly great films about this kind of world and its crossroads, such as “The Great Beauty” or “La Dolce Vita.”
(Allen’s films are inspired by Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, from 1963, which shares a lot with the master Italian director’s La Dolce Vita, from three years earlier, which, in turn, informed Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, from 2013, though the latter two movies concern journalists, not performers.)
The story also lifts parts of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, about a tabloid journalist confronting the emptiness of his celebrity-centric life, and the same director’s 8½, about the midlife crisis of a self-indulgent filmmaker.
I couldn’t help but picture Marcello Mastroianni, taking stock of his life in Fellini’s 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita.
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It's La dolce vita soured by '90s pop-culture clichés and Allen's mean-spirited imagination (his satiric eye and savvy are on the level of Entertainment Tonight).
The black-and-white cinematography, the metropolitan setting, and the subject matter bring to mind the wondrous La Dolce Vita, but the comparison is a pale one indeed.
This big, muddled, contemporary variation on La Dolce Vita, shot in breathtaking black and white by Sven Nykvist, contrasts the up-escalator and down-escalator rides of journalist Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh, out-Woodying Woody in mannerisms, but why?), and his neurotic ex-wife, Robin (Allen's favorite wounded she-wolf, Judy Davis), a former literature teacher.
If writer/director Allen's Deconstructing Harry was a sour rehash of Wild Strawberries, the even more jaundiced Celebrity (notwithstanding Sven Nykvist 's lustrous b/w camerawork) could be his La Dolce Vita.
Apparently inspired by Fellini's La Dolce Vita and a year's subscription to People magazine -- not to mention his own travails -- writer-director Allen revels in the flashy, trashy world of misplaced acclaim and self-absorbed behavior.
When not occupied with agents or equally tormented family members like his brother (Wes Bentley) or his father ( Brian Dennehy ), Rick spends his time living the lush life to an extent actual screenwriters rarely do, going to "La Dolce Vita"-type Hollywood parties and cavorting with platoons of all-too-willing female accomplices.
We can safely infer that Bale’s character (identified as “Rick” in the closing credits) is meant to be a latter-day stand-in for that knight, a Hollywood type who has embraced la dolce vita and lost his sense of self in the process.
Despair abounds in stylish duds, no doubt, and parallels to chic sixties cinema are obvious, but it’s a far cry from the disaffected existentialism of L’Eclisse or La Dolce Vita.
(If there’s a model here, it’s Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, particularly in some star-packed party scenes set on the grounds of Antonio Banderas’ happily hedonistic character.)