Film proves Fellini ahead of his time

One of the key works of the modern cinema, Federico Fellini’s 1961 film “La Dolce Vita” looks ever more prescient. A brilliantly conceived epic fable about a gossip columnist who thinks he still has higher aspirations, the film holds its age well.

Centering on Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), adrift in Rome’s high life, “La Dolce Vita” introduced the term paparazzi into the vocabulary, and depicted, with a judicious mixture of satire and compassion, the world of celebrity, which has never been more avidly chronicled than right now

“La Dolce Vita” is also one of the triumphs of have-it-both-ways filmmaking: Fellini reveals the emptiness, boredom and destructiveness of the Via Veneto existence, while at the same time making it highly glamorous and seductive. Yet the film doesn’t have the same dazzling, immediate impact that it did when seen in first run – it takes more time to get caught up in it. It’s not that “La Dolce Vita” is less than one’s memory of it – it is an arguably great film – but that its world has become so much more familiar. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that this film was crucial in giving birth to the contemporary media sensationalism that it reveals as lethally shallow. Marcello, surely, anticipates Geraldo and beyond.

Ever on the run, Rubini, in a series of superbly orchestrated episodes, moves easily from his base in the Via Veneto to nightclubs and parties thrown by decadent aristocrats in their crumbling palazzos. He covers everything from dubious miracles to arriving Hollywood stars.

Fellini makes each and every one of his encounters memorable, deeply evocative and revealing of Rubini’s fading lack of purpose. Once a Roman journalist himself, Fellini understands well how corrupting access to the rich and powerful can be. The suave, handsome Rubini understandably attracts a compulsively promiscuous heiress (Anouk Aimee) as well as a Hollywood sex goddess (Anita Ekberg), who possesses an exuberant, beguiling childlike innocence; she is, of all things, a kittenish amazon of a woman.

With its shimmering, familiar Nino Rota score, Otello Martelli’s ravishingly lit black-and-white cinematography and its endless processions of the foolish, the grotesque, the jaded and the merely young and beautiful, “La Dolce Vita” is truly unforgettable. Written by Fellini with Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano and Brunello Rondi, it’s a film possessed of vision and scale. This latest revival of “La Dolce Vita” is a reminder of just how enduring and intuitively cinematic a storyteller and social observer Federico Fellini really was.