MarcelLa Dolce Vita English subtitles
starring Marcello Mastroianni
Director: Federico Fellini


Essential Actor / Actresses Here

Amazon.com
At three brief hours, Fellini's cynical, engrossing social commentary, La Dolce Vita stands as his timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence, as extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni, a man of paradoxical emotional juxtapositions: cool, but tortured, sexy, but impotent. He dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticizes finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Instead, he engages in an ménage à trois, then frolics in a fountain with a giggling American starlet (bombshell Anita Ekberg), and in the film's unforgettably inspired finale, attends a wild orgy that ends, symbolically, with its participants finding a rotting sea animal while wandering the beach at dawn. Fellini saw his film as life affirming (thus its title, The Sweet Life), but it's impossible to take him seriously. While Mastroianni drifts from one worldly pleasure to another, be it sex, drink, glamorous parties, or rich foods, they are presented, through his detached eyes, are merely momentary distractions. His existence, an endless series of wild evenings and lonely mornings, is ultimately soulless and facile. Because he lacks the courage to change, Mastroianni is left with no alternative but to wearily accept and enjoy this "sweet" life.

Synopsis
Director Frederico Fellini's portrait of a hedonistic Rome centers on a handsome journalist in constant pursuit of the extravagant, the sensational and the absurd.

Video Description
A newspaperman who works for a shabby scandal sheet becomes intimately involved with the decadent high society individuals his publication so often maligns. The immoral lifestyles he witnesses nearly paralyze him with shock and outrage. Winner of the 1961 New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Academy Award Nominations: 4, including Best Director, Best (Original) Story and Screenplay. Academy Awards: Best (Black-and-White) Costume Design.

Video Annotation
The Republic Pictures Home Video version is mastered from the original film negative. Winner of the New York Film Critics Award. Additional cast includes: Valeria Ciangottini, Renee Longarini, Carlo di Maggio and Giulio Girola.

lo Mastroianni
If McQueen, Brando, and Dean epitomized American cool in the '50s and '60s, Marcello Mastroianni had the European market locked up--sleek, chic, and positively unruffled, even in the face of utter desolation. He gained his greatest stature as alter ego for Federico Fellini in his masterpieces La Dolce Vita and 8-1/2, conveying his torment with detached panache--and looking great while doing it. He also memorably made love onscreen to some of the era's most beautiful women: Anita Ekberg, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, and of course his longtime friend Sophia Loren, with whom he lit up the screen one final time in Robert Altman's 1994 Ready to Wear.

 

 

 

 

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