There is so much more to Fellini than ‘La Dolce Vita’

Ahead of the re-release of Fellini’s classic film and the launch of a BFI centenary retrospective, Geoffrey Macnab reflects on some of the Italian maestro’s more overlooked works

Anita Ekberg dancing in a scene from the film ‘La Dolce Vita’, 1960 (American International Pictures/Getty)

It is understandable that the BFI’s two-month, UK-wide “centenary” retrospective of Federico Fellini (1920-1993) is opening with the Italian director’s most famous film. Mention Fellini and the image that still springs most readily to mind is of Swedish actress Anita Ekberg as the movie star, Sylvia Rank, in her strapless black dress, looking like a goddess from a Botticelli painting, as she takes an impromptu shower under the waters of the Trevi Fountain in Rome in La Dolce Vita (1960).

The BFI’s marketing for the season emphasises the “exuberantly playful” nature of Fellini’s filmmaking. However, it is worth remembering what happens after Sylvia and her consort for the evening, Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), come out of the fountain. When they return to her hotel, she is slapped by her drunken, angry fiance, Robert (Lex Barker). Once she retreats tearfully into the hotel, Robert then blithely beats up Marcello. The scene is witnessed by Marcello’s friend, the vulture-like photographer Paparazzo (Walter Santesso), who, of course, doesn’t intervene.

La Dolce Vita leaves a strangely sour taste. Alongside its scenes of reckless hedonism, it is full of squalor, suffering and disillusionment. Characters take drug overdoses or kill their own children. Its jaded pleasure seekers risk seeming very condescending towards the working-class Romans whose lives occasionally intersect with their own. In one uncomfortable early scene, Marcello and an upper-class woman he has met at a nightclub pick up a prostitute and drive her home. Her apartment is squalid. She has to put down planks so they can walk across its flooded floor. She prepares coffee for them while they make love in the one dry room. If they are aware they are exploiting her hospitality, they don’t show it.