Movie #41: Released in 1960, 176 minutes, directed by Federico Fellini. New to me!

LetterBoxd Score: 4 stars

This is another movie I didn’t love, but I do respect. By that, I mostly mean that it didn’t induce much of an internal reaction while I was watching: I wasn’t caught up in the characters, their plights, didn’t lose myself, didn’t find myself thinking a ton about what it all meant, etc. There were a few exceptions; Marcel in the final episode disgusted me, many of the people are beautiful, I really liked the crazed spooky energy when it faded to black in the castle, and the people are beautiful. But mostly it rolled off me for a few hours. If film is an empathy machine, this movie wasn’t a well-oiled machine for me.

But after it was over I read a few articles about it, and now it’s sticking with me. (It helps that the movie has attained such mythic stature that the episodes have been given pithy names: Steiner’s tragedy, the orgy, etc.) I see now that it’s an expansive and memorable portrait of a moral collapse (I say collapse, implying something that was has fallen apart – I guess that’s one read of all the religion in this movie). Maybe the film’s pessimism just doesn’t match my temperament – does it really make sense that Steiner killed himself like that?

The movie is an interesting portrait of a kind of gender relations that is still with us today, but was probably more prominent in the past. A failure, on a man’s part, to think of women as primarily human beings like themselves, and to think of relating to women in the same way you might relate to a man. Instead, women are othered. They are mystical meaning machines, like Sylvia (and to some degree Maddalena), or they are minor adornments that might nag you or entertain you. But they’re not just, like, people. I don’t think La Dolce Vita is unique in demonstrating this view on gender relations (which I assume, perhaps wrongly, to just be what Fellini believes), but among the movies I’ve seen so far it struck me more forcefully, probably because Marcel is so frequently pursuing women. The movie, to me, seems to have less interest in the inner lives of what it is to be a woman in this era than Some Like It Hot or Imitation of Life. My guess is that this attitude comes from differentiation of the life paths for men and women, which cultivates difference in a way that’s less common today. (Full disclosure: I listened to a discussion of John Stuart Mill’s On The Subjection of Women today, which has me thinking along these tracks).

One other weird thing about this movie – it’s not available anywhere very legitimate to stream: not streaming on Criterion channel or Max, not available to rent on Amazon or Apple. You can watch it on Plex with ads and bad subtitles, or an apparently pirated stream on YouTube with less bad subtitles. I opted for the latter.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest films ever made?

Easy enough to see; it has the feeling of someone shooting for a sacred text. Indeed, I wonder if one reason it didn’t resonate with me is that it is so complex that it only opens up on rewatching. But if so, I probably need an evangel to pull me back for another viewing. It didn’t entice me on its own merits.

Next: Breathless