Verdict:
This is one of those films made for other filmmakers and pretentious art critics rather than for the audience. Its artistic cinematography and message takes priority over the entertainment value.
The film is about seven days worth of adventures of a celebrity journalist played by Marcello Mastroianni, which mostly consist of him chasing the tails of various women, but there is more to it.
This movie is a cynic. It keeps introducing a situation and then showing the sombre dirty layer underneath it. The writing is pretty effective at exposing the filthy drama and shows the contrast between the sensational world and real human suffering underneath. I can see why the church got angry at this film. There is a good bit of religious content, and it is treated with equal cynicism, with a whole scene dedicated to showing how a miracle is handled.
The biggest problem for me is that the story feels artificially inflated, and certain parts are hard to follow. The movie opens with a Jesus statute being transported to the Vatican, without giving a clue what this is all about. Who are these girls the main character is suddenly talking to and why? Never really explained. The movie is filled with religious symbolism but it is not always obvious and not relevant to the story. The fact that the movie covers 7 days is supposed to be meaningful but is ask yourself: do you count things like the number of days when you watch a movie, unless someone told you about it in advance?
The movie is under three hours but feels more like 30 hours. Some conversations seem to go nowhere. There is a scene that drags on forever in which a bunch of people are exploring a haunted house. There are all these random people that start appearing towards the end. In combination with the style of dialogue, this movie can feel like a drag, especially as it’s nearing its conclusion.
Acting is of mixed quality. For one, there is a sterile quality to fit the aforementioned stylized dialogue and this style takes some time getting used to. At times it feels like two actors are having an abstract poetry reading on an avant-garde stage. Also, Anita Ekberg, playing a busty American actress, made a faky mess out of her role, with some terrible dubbing. The spoken dialogue in general is badly lip-synced.
The movie is very…Italian in its visuals. The actors are smoking as they are drinking and wearing sunglasses that look like they were the pinnacle of fashion of the time in which the movie was made.
Martelli’s cinematography is artistic with very well-composed shots of countless groups of people, but it also can be quite inadequate when it comes to certain technical aspects.
There is this one scene in particular where two actors are standing in front of what is clearly a blurry movie screen rather than a real background. They speak something but their dialogue is poorly lip-synced. There is a very obvious glimmering wire attached the hat of an actress, which then gets pulled and the hat flies off as if blown away by wind.
Mind you, this is a movie that apparently had enough money to shoot scenes with a helicopter carrying a big statue from above (a scene that was not even that important to the movie’s overall message), but apparently could neither film on location nor find an alternative location that could work for this particular scene. In the past filming of people against a film background was common when shooting inside vehicles but in this movie it is overused and especially obvious. Movies usually attempt to hide the blemishes, for example by only showing the scene for a short time. In La Dolce Vita, the camera always takes its sweet time.
I am torn about this one. On the one hand, there is no doubt that La Dolce Vita is going for something epic and has a lot of talent on display. On the other hand, I hate its self-important protracted pomp. It is a curious bag of interesting scenes but also scenes that are overstretched, with over-the-top dialogue and technical issues. La Dolce Vita has impact and is worth watching just for that, but if you’re a pragmatic movie goer who doesn’t like to be bullsh*tted, then I would skip this one.