Heard and Seen: La Dolce Vita

Extract

In the latest issue of the Revue Internationale du Cinema, the journal of the international Catholic cinema office, there is an article on the moral assessment of certain recent co-production films, as applied in various national centres. This demonstrates how the same film may get very different ratings from country to country: when we see that La Dolce Vita has been put into the ‘a proscrire’ category in Italy, the point is well taken. For now that it has reached the commercial screen in England it is difficult, from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, to see what all the fuss was about. From this side of the Channel it looks even more like a scathing moral indictment of a way of living that may be over-stated but is, as we all know, true enough in its essentials. Signor Fellini has said in a London interview that the Rome he has portrayed is his idea of Rome, not necessarily the true Rome; but this is no more, after all, than any creator’s way with his material and need not in any way surprise us.

This long film, whose spatial control is so precise and whose temporal control is often so slack, sprawls across nearly three hours in a series of episodes whose visual attack frequently packs a much heavier punch than their intellectual content. From the first moment when the helicopter bears down upon the Roman suburbs, with the statue of Christ the Worker slung beneath it—ruined viaduct and bare tenement wall taking the statue’s shadow like a stigmata—Fellini’s sheer cinematic virtuosity imposes itself without question.