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.
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.”
That film, which one suspects loses everything on the small screen, was, in essence, a great, frothy homage to Federico Fellini's masterpiece, La Dolce Vita.
Combining the social satire of Fellini with the sinful hedonism of latter-day Scorsese – think La Dolce Vita via The Wolf of Wall Street – the party sequences are a riot of decadence.
In 2014 Paolo Sorrentino won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for The Great Beauty , a movie that updated Fellini’s La Dolce Vita for the age of Silvio Berlusconi.
It is an obvious and unearned quotation of the beginning of Fellini’s masterpiece La Dolce Vita , when a helicopter carries a crucifix over Rome.
Scamarcio gives off a whiff of Tony Curtis in “Sweet Smell of Success,” and also of Marcello Mastroianni in “La Dolce Vita,” though his milieu makes theirs look positively antiseptic.
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).
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.
Borrowing liberally from The War of the Worlds, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and seemingly every other sci-fi outing this side of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, the picture somehow manages to recycle these reference points and come up with something that works on its own terms.
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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.
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.
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.)
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Although he says the title’s echoes of Fellini are unintentional (Roma is the name of the neighborhood he lived in), the movie’s rich pageantry does recall some of the more impressive set pieces of 8 1/2 or La Dolce Vita.
The “Roma” title and Fellini connection park it in a ’60s-70s cinema of “La Dolce Vita” and “Swept Away,” “Last Year at Marienbad” and “The Go Between” — languorous films whose auteurs refused to cut for clarity and dramatic impetus.
Above, the spectacle after word of the alien gets out evokes the one in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," when 2 children claim they saw the Virgin Mary.