OVERDUE Writer Eloise Hallo
Fellini’s La Dolce Vita remains, nearly 70 years after its release, a Pandora’s Box to art’s account for human desire. Critics far more established than I grapple still with what the work hopes to tell us about nature, in all senses of the word, and perhaps that is precisely the point; ‘the sweet life’, whatever our autere may mean, evades us when we search for it so fervently. In 1960, when the film met screens across Italy, movie- goers — determined to try their hand at hedonism — met devout protestors who claimed the narrative they were so nearly to enjoy threatened to uproot not least their piety but that of the entire population of Rome and the epithets of Catholicism it defined globally.
And can one blame them? Fellini’s opening scene sees Marcello, our protagonist, curiously namesake‑d by his actor Marcello Mastroianni, divert his course in transporting a figure of the Virgin Mary to instead seduce women sunbathing on a rooftop — a start, as he means to go on, in exploring what corrupts us. Neither the women nor the statue are seen again, though motifs of both pick up the slack throughout. Fellini’s collection of seemingly inconspicuous vignettes like so, which make up the plot’s entirety, are joined mostly by what they collectively give and take from our ability to attach ourselves to the film; some lure us in while others shut us out. Never being lent fully either, Marcello’s stream of consciousness — within which we are suspended — works to tether and detach us from the story itself; a veritable slap in the face to the shot- reverse-shots and musical climaxes of heart-jilting Western cinema at the time. Fellini’s characters are quite similarly capricious, using costuming to hide and expose the parts of themselves they do and do not wish to be chronicled. Being then that we voyeurs are at its will, fashion becomes animate as not only a character, but a shared disguise: a public amorphous agent controlling what we are and aren’t to know about the tale we’ve paid to see.
One of the ways Fellini most swiftly establishes this is through the surprisingly opaque ploy of actual masks. The film’s opening act follows masked dancers, and it is the first in many examples of veiled performers in La Dolce Vita, tying what we come to understand about entertainment in the film’s verse with early undercurrents of falsity. Yet, as is to become clear with adjoining speed, it is not solely the onus of performers to dabble in costume. Maddalena, one of (the incredibly busy) Marcello’s three main lovers, will soon meet our gaze half-hidden by a fabulous pair of cat-eye sunglasses — not dissimilarly to the fascinators and tiaras adorned by others in the scene — in affirmation that the restaurant’s rich dinner-goers too partake in masquerade.
Later, we will learn her glasses hide a black eye — a seemingly major plot-point Fellini will never choose to explain — and a reminder that we are not in control of where this narrative goes nor what its character’s fashioning’s hide about their respective inner-worlds. That, we will see, is the responsibility of the characters themselves, confirmed in a scene shared by Sylvia and Marcello, where the former de-masks the latter — by removing his specs — in a moment of disarmament.
Sylvia, played by Anita Ekberg, personifies one of the film’s main themes — celebrity — and introduces a caveat to Fellini’s conceptions of camouflage. Swedish movie star and seductress, she is sent into the narrative in trivialisation of star-culture itself, and precisely how it seduces us so. For this crime, her punishment is revile and exposé: when Sylvia uses her fur — symbolic of the success and wealth she has garnered — to hide from the paparazzi it does no such good in preventing her jealous lover from publicly hitting her to the glee of their voyeurs. We learn in Sylvia that one cannot engage fully in spectacle and practised smiles without negating their ability to mask the sad realities to their life. And we, who have been denied such spectacle til now, can’t help but share the pique of the paparazzi, as Fellini laughs at us, proving we are no better.
La Dolce Vita’s characters hide too in their toning. Whilst it is fair to say they primarily share the hemiat of being ‘adrift’, generally speaking, absent — may be better termed for some than others — their colourings intimate how exactly that manifests. The darker fashions of Maddalena and Marcello (amongst others) belie discontent, and the lighter garmentry of Sylvia and Paola, who we will meet later, identifies their vulnerability and, in some senses, notions of femininity which neighbour it.
Marcello, who begins the narrative dressed in only black, will see it off in nearly all white, a slow undressing, so as to speak, in one of the most interesting ideas raised by the work.
In Marcello, Fellini’s whisperings of the hidden and the exposed take on more metaphysical meanings. Throughout the film, La Dolce Vita’s autere toys with the idea of anima and animus, and his lead’s move from shadow into the light represents his growing acknowledgement of the feminine levels to his male ego. Such levels are literalised in 4 of the film’s female figures, personifying each stage of anima: Eve, Mary, Helen, and Sophia.
‘Eve’ represents the object of desire, and she is animate in Maddalena. Her demure, if apathetic, nature aligns with the dark mystique to her clothing, and both are understood as by-products of her status as heiress and emblem of Rome’s nouveau riche. Her face is seldom unshrouded, hidden in scenes by headscarves, eyewear, and foulards, affirming the sentiment that we may see or have parts of her, but — as defined by desire — never all.
Quite unlike Eve is ‘Mary’, of virginal fame, portrayed by Paola or ‘The Girl’, as she is often credited (and as Alison Bechdel would get a kick out of, I’m sure). Her characterisation is distinctly holy; Marcello in fact tells her she reminds him of an angel, and her depiction matches in both modesty and naivety — not unduly, as she is played by a fourteen-year-old Valeria Ciangottini. Mary and Eve — from bible to anima — exist as polars, and Marcello’s attraction to both, be it however concerning in regard to the former, represents the scale across which we all long for things we cannot have nor be; even ‘Mary’ will not keep her virtues; she too will grow old and flawed, as are Fellini’s adults — alluded to perhaps in the final scene whereby she trades her white gingham dress for black.
Next up is Sylvia, who quite aptly encompasses the famed beauty ‘Helen’ (i.e., of Troy). This stage of the anima structure figures ‘woman’ as capable of material success but lacking in that moral salt to the Mary’s of the world — what disrepute would befall us were women capable of both! Fellini makes no mistake in his casting and costume design; Sylvia’s illustrious adornments make clear her independence both sensually and financially, yet the clown-show that follows her public image entices one to think of her as, for lack of a better term, empty. Pedestaled and objectified, it is in Helen we begin to see our director’s issue with both celebrity culture and the male-gaze it is so often entangled with, paving the entry of ‘Sophia’ or Iris, as she exists in La Dolce Vita, intellect, poet, and prophet, who is granted the forgiving posit of masculine and feminine qualities, invited into male spheres, and spared the fate of being made abject. Interestingly, something Fellini may have struggled to achieve had she not been played by an older actress in pesky flowing linens, tampering with our will to sexualise leading ladies.
Emma, Marcello’s wife, is, unfortunately, afforded no such grace. She represents no anima stage and is thusly no real inhabitant of her husband. Her costuming is ill-defined and haplessly relevant to the narrative, sadly — as she is — utilised only when we are to learn something of her betrothed.
It is not my belief that Fellini intends, nor is there much hope in attempt, for us to leave his film with any founded moral realisations. The paparazzi’s ability to hide behind pinhole cameras is not unlike Marcello’s unconscious choice to flit between the women he meets, searching for mirrors in himself he does not fully understand: both find it easier to focus their efforts on the spectacle of others, primarily, because it’s human nature to do so — why else would we Schadenfreude’s return time and again to gossip columns and the oracle of Deux Moi? Of course, there is much to be said of La Dolce Vita. Fellini’s ability to weave psychological and social structures into what is an otherwise largely intelligible film is masterful. Yet, few consider how its fashions supplement such mastery, and I think it’s time we ought to.
Source La Dolce Vita dir. by Frederico Fellini, prod. by Riama Film, Pathé Consortium Cinéma, Gray Films, 1960.