La Dolce Vita
Director: Federico Fellini
7:30 p.m. Thursday
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
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La Dolce Vita might not be Federico Fellini’s greatest film, but it’s certainly way up there, which by definition makes it one of the greatest movies of all time. That being the case, no cinephile with a hankering for the sweet life should forgo an opportunity to see this Italian-language masterpiece on the big screen.
Cue Oklahoma City Museum of Art, which screens La Dolce Vita at 7:30 p.m. tonight (Thursday, for those of you still reeling from the time change).
Winner of the coveted Palme d’or at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, the movie propelled Marcello Mastroianni to international superstardom as a playboy gossip columnist partying his way through the glittery Rome nightlife at the dawn of the ’60s. Fellini, never one for subtlety, hammers Big Themes in the opening. A helicopter pulls a huge statue of Christ high over the city. In another chopper are Marcello and his cameraman Paparazzo — the latter’s moniker would inspire the name for those paparazzi whom Alec Baldwin likes to beat the crap out of — dutifully following the statue’s transport to the Vatican.
But then Marcello spies a group of bikini-clad hotties waving from the ground below, and his attentions turn to less sacred sights. It is a magnificently audacious scene, but only one of many in a sprawling tale that weaves from the nightclubs of the Via Veneto to a ravishing (and recently deceased) Anita Ekberg wading into the Trevi Fountain.
What does it all mean? Good question. Marcello disappears into a glitzy playground, even as he senses a moral desolation beneath it all. The late, great Roger Ebert deemed La Dolce Vita as allegorical, “a cautionary tale of a man without a center.” Probably so. But Fellini sure did make decadence look so damned fun.
