Federico Fellini's three-hour Roman epic. Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain, and the film that gave the world the word 'paparazzi.'
Rome, late 1950s. Marcello Rubini, a tabloid gossip journalist, moves through the city's nightlife covering celebrity scandals, religious miracles, and the parties of Roman aristocracy. The film is structured as seven nights and dawns — there is no conventional plot. Marcello pursues a series of women (his fiancée Emma, the visiting American film star Sylvia, the wealthy Maddalena, a young waitress on the beach) without committing to any of them. He aspires to write a serious novel; he never does.
The film closes with Marcello at a dawn beach party, watching a strange sea creature pulled from the water, separated by surf and noise from a young woman on the other beach who recognised him from earlier in the film. The girl waves and shouts to him; he cannot hear her. The film ends. There is no resolution to Marcello's drift.
La Dolce Vita's secondary character Paparazzo (played by Walter Santesso) — the freelance celebrity photographer who chases scandals across Rome with Marcello — became the source of the English-language word 'paparazzi.' Fellini and screenwriter Ennio Flaiano chose the name from a place name in George Gissing's 1901 Italian travel book By the Ionian Sea. The name's cultural penetration since the film's release is, in some sense, La Dolce Vita's most-quantifiable single cultural achievement.
What the character represented in 1960 was the emerging phenomenon of professional celebrity photography. The post-war Italian film industry centred at Rome's Cinecittà studios had produced a new economy of celebrity photographers whose income depended on getting unauthorised shots of famous figures. The film documented and named the phenomenon at almost the exact moment it became globally recognisable.
The film's most-iconic sequence is the Trevi Fountain scene — Sylvia, the American film star (Anita Ekberg), wading into the fountain in a strapless black gown at dawn, with Marcello watching from the edge. The sequence runs roughly five minutes. It was shot in March 1959 in cold conditions; Ekberg reportedly performed the wading scenes without complaint while Mastroianni wore a wetsuit under his suit.
The sequence has become one of the most-quoted single images in modern cinema. It has been parodied, homaged, and culturally absorbed across decades. The Trevi Fountain itself has, since La Dolce Vita, become a tourist site partly because of the film's specific framing of it. Most subsequent visitors who throw coins into the fountain are, in some sense, performing a ritual the film helped establish.
La Dolce Vita is, by 1960 conventions, structurally unusual. There is no clear protagonist arc. There is no climactic resolution. The film moves through seven separate nights, each with its own set of characters and tonal register. The connections between the nights are thematic rather than narrative. Marcello is present in all of them, but the character's relationship to the events is mostly observational rather than active.
What this gives the film is a kind of structural argument that conventional plot is not the only way to organise feature-length cinema. The film's audience is asked to read across the seven nights for patterns of meaning rather than to follow a building dramatic line. The technique has been influential — Robert Altman's ensemble films, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, and many subsequent multi-storyline features are downstream of La Dolce Vita's structural choices.