Prologue

1st Day Sequence: A helicopter transports a statue of Christ over an ancient Roman aqueduct outside Rome while a second, Marcello Rubini's news helicopter, follows it into the city. The news helicopter is momentarily sidetracked by a group of bikini-clad women sunbathing on the rooftop of a high-rise apartment building. Hovering above, Marcello uses gestures to elicit phone numbers from them but fails in his attempt. He then shrugs and continues following the statue to Saint Peter's Square.

Episode 1

1st Night Sequence: Marcello meets Maddalena by chance in an exclusive nightclub. A beautiful and wealthy heiress, Maddalena is tired of Rome, while Marcello finds it suits him. They make love in the bedroom of a prostitute whom they had given a ride home in Maddalena's Cadillac.

1st Dawn Sequence: Marcello returns to his apartment to find that his fiancée, Emma, has overdosed. On the way to the hospital, he declares his everlasting love to her and again as she lies in a semiconscious state in the emergency room. While waiting frantically for her recovery, however, he tries to make a phone call to Maddalena.

Episode 2

2nd Day Sequence: That day, he goes on assignment for the arrival of Sylvia, a famous Swedish-American actress, at Ciampino airport where she is met by a horde of news reporters.

During Sylvia's press conference, Marcello calls home to ensure Emma has taken her medication while reassuring her that he is not alone with Sylvia. After the film star confidently replies to the barrage of journalists' questions, her boyfriend Robert enters the room late and drunk. Marcello casually recommends to Sylvia's producer that she be taken on a tour of St Peter's.

Inside St Peter's dome, a news reporter complains that Sylvia is "an elevator" because none of them can match her energetic climb up the numerous flights of stairs. Inspired, Marcello maneuvers forward to be alone with her when they finally reach the balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square.

2nd Night Sequence: That evening, the infatuated Marcello dances with Sylvia in the Baths of Caracalla. Sylvia's natural sensuality triggers raucous partying while Robert, her bored fiancé, draws caricatures and reads a newspaper. His humiliating remark to her causes Sylvia to leave the group, eagerly followed by Marcello and his paparazzi colleagues. Finding themselves alone, Marcello and Sylvia spend the rest of the evening in the alleys of Rome, where they wade into the Trevi Fountain.

2nd Dawn Sequence: Like a magic spell that has suddenly been broken, dawn arrives at the very moment Sylvia playfully "anoints" Marcello's head with fountain water. They drive back to Sylvia's hotel to find an enraged Robert waiting for her in his car. Robert slaps Sylvia, orders her to go to bed, and then assaults Marcello, who takes it in stride.

Episode 3

3rd Day Sequence: Marcello meets Steiner, his distinguished intellectual friend, inside a church. Steiner shows off his book of Sanskrit grammar. The two go up to play the organ, offering up a jazz piece for the watching priest before playing Bach.

Episode 4

3rd Day Sequence: Late afternoon, Marcello, his photographer friend Paparazzo, and Emma drive to the outskirts of Rome to cover the story of the purported sighting of the Madonna by two children. Although the Catholic Church is officially skeptical, a huge crowd of devotees and reporters gathers at the site.

3rd Night Sequence: That night, the event is broadcast over Italian radio and television. Emma prays to the Virgin Mary to be given sole possession of Marcello's heart. Blindly following the two children from corner to corner in a downpour, the crowd tears a small tree apart for its branches and leaves said to have sheltered the Madonna.

3rd Dawn Sequence: The gathering ends at dawn with the crowd mourning a sick child, a pilgrim brought by his mother to be healed, but trampled to death in the melee.

Episode 3b

4th Night Sequence: One evening, Marcello and Emma attend a gathering at Steiner's luxurious home, where they are introduced to a group of intellectuals who recite poetry, strum the guitar, offer philosophical ideas, and listen to sounds of nature recorded on tape. The British poet Iris Tree, whose poetry Marcello has read and admired, recommends that Marcello avoid the "prisons" of commitment: "Stay free, available, like me. Never get married. Never choose. Even in love, it's better to be chosen." Emma appears enchanted with Steiner's home and children, telling Marcello that one day he will have a home like Steiner's, but he turns away moodily.

Outside on the terrace, Marcello confesses to Steiner his admiration for all he stands for, but Steiner admits he is torn between the security that a materialistic life affords and his longing for a more spiritual albeit insecure way of life. Steiner philosophizes about the need for love in the world and fears what his children may grow up to face one day.

Intermezzo

5th Day Sequence: Marcello spends the afternoon working on his novel at a seaside restaurant, where he meets Paola, a young waitress from Perugia playing Perez Prado's cha-cha “Patricia” on the jukebox and then humming its tune. He asks her if she has a boyfriend, then describes her as an angel in Umbrian paintings.

Episode 5

5th Night Sequence: Marcello meets his father visiting Rome on the Via Veneto. With Paparazzo, they go to the "Cha-Cha" Club, where Marcello introduces his father to Fanny, a beautiful dancer and one of his past girlfriends (he had promised to get her picture in the paper but failed to do it). Fanny takes a liking to his father. Marcello tells Paparazzo that as a child he had never seen much of his father, who would spend weeks away from home. Fanny invites Marcello's father back to her flat, and two other dancers invite the two younger men to go with them. Marcello leaves the others when they get to the dancers' neighborhood. Fanny comes out of her house, upset that Marcello's father has become ill.

5th Dawn Sequence: Marcello's father has suffered what seems to be a mild heart attack. Marcello wants him to stay with him in Rome so they can get to know each other, but his father, weakened, wants to go home and gets in a taxi to catch the first train to Cesena. He leaves Marcello forlorn, on the street, watching the taxi leave.

Episode 6

6th Night Sequence: Marcello, Nico, and other friends meet on the Via Veneto and are driven to a castle owned by aristocrats at Bassano di Sutri outside Rome. There is already a party long in progress, and the party-goers are bleary-eyed and intoxicated. By chance, Marcello meets Maddalena again. The two of them explore a suite of ruins annexed to the castle. Maddalena seats Marcello in a vast room and then closets herself in another room connected by an echo chamber. As a disembodied voice, Maddalena asks him to marry her; Marcello professes his love for her, avoiding answering her proposal. Another man kisses and embraces Maddalena, who loses interest in Marcello. He rejoins the group, and eventually spends the night with Jane, a British artist and heiress.

6th Dawn Sequence: Burnt out and bleary-eyed, the group returns at dawn to the main section of the castle, to be met by the matriarch of the castle, who is on her way to mass, accompanied by priests in a procession.

Episode 3c

7th Night Sequence: Marcello and Emma are alone in his sports car on an isolated road. Emma starts an argument by professing her love and tries to get out of the car; Marcello pleads with her not to get out. Emma says that Marcello will never find another woman who loves him the way she does. Marcello becomes enraged, telling her that he cannot live with her smothering, maternal love. He now wants her to get out of the car, but she refuses. With some violence (a bite from her and a slap from him), he throws her out of the car and drives off, leaving her alone on a deserted road at night. Hours later, Emma hears his car returning as she picks flowers by the roadside. She gets into the car with neither of them saying a word.

7th Dawn Sequence: Marcello and Emma are asleep in bed, tenderly intertwined; Marcello receives a phone call. He rushes to the Steiners' apartment and learns that Steiner has killed his two children and himself.

8th Day Sequence: After waiting with the police for Steiner's wife to return home, he meets her outside to break the terrible news while the paparazzi swarm around her snapping pictures.

Episode 7

8th Night Sequence: An unspecified amount of time later, an older Marcello—now with gray in his hair—and a group of partygoers break into a Fregene beach house owned by Riccardo, a friend of Marcello's. Many of the men are homosexual. Marcello is mocked for abandoning literature and reporting to become a publicity agent. To celebrate her recent divorce from Riccardo, Nadia performs a striptease to Perez Prado's cha-cha “Patricia”. Riccardo shows up at the house and tells the partiers to leave. The drunken Marcello attempts to provoke the other partygoers into an orgy. However, their inebriation causes the party to descend into mayhem, with Marcello riding a young woman crawling on her hands and knees and throwing pillow feathers around the room.

Epilogue

8th Dawn Sequence: The party proceeds to the beach at dawn where they find a modern-day leviathan, a bloated, sea ray-like creature, caught in the fishermen's nets.^{[lower-alpha 1]} In his stupor, Marcello comments on how its eyes stare even in death.

9th Day Sequence: Paola, the adolescent waitress from the seaside restaurant in Fregene, calls to Marcello from across an estuary, but the words they exchange are lost on the wind, drowned out by the crashing waves. He signals his inability to understand what she is saying or interpret her gestures. He shrugs and returns to the partygoers; one of the women joins him and they hold hands as they walk away from the beach. In a long final close-up, Paola waves to Marcello and then stands watching him with an enigmatic smile.

Costumes

In various interviews, Fellini said that the film's initial inspiration was the fashionable ladies' sack dress because of what the dress could hide beneath it.^[10] Brunello Rondi, Fellini's co-screenwriter and long-time collaborator, confirmed this view explaining that "the fashion of women's sack dresses which possessed that sense of luxurious butterflying out around a body that might be physically beautiful but not morally so; these sack dresses struck Fellini because they rendered a woman very gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside."^[11]

Writing

Credit for the creation of Steiner, the intellectual who commits suicide after shooting his two children, goes to co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli. Having gone to school with Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, Pinelli had closely followed the writer's career and felt that his over-intellectualism had become emotionally sterile, leading to his suicide in a Turin hotel in 1950.^[12] This idea of a "burnt-out existence" is carried over to Steiner in the party episode where the sounds of nature are not to be experienced first-hand by himself and his guests but in the virtual world of tape recordings.

The “false miracle” alludes to the 1958 investigation discounting the claims of two children to have been visited by the Madonna in a farm at Maratta Alta, near Terni.^[13] The "dead sea monster" alludes to the Montesi affair, in which the dead body of 21 year old Wilma Montesi was discovered on a beach in April 1953.^[14]

Casting

La Dolce Vita marks the first collaboration between Fellini and Mastroianni. On November 4, 1977 in an interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Mastroianni recalled their first encounter. According to Mastroianni, Fellini told him that the producer wanted Paul Newman for the lead role, but that Fellini considered Newman too beautiful, while Mastroianni was "the face of normal."^[15] Mastroianni, somewhat embarrassed, requested to read the script before agreeing to the role:

I said, "Well, ok, I would like to read the script please." He [Fellini] said, "Why not? Ennio, come with the script"...I opened the script and there was nothing written...blank pages...then I saw a sketch of the sea and a man swimming with an enormous...[Mastroianni indicates a large phallus]...and around his element there was a dance of mermaids. I became green, red, yellow. I said, "Well, it seems very interesting...Where do I sign? And that's how I met Fellini."^[15]

Filming

Most of the film was shot at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Set designer Piero Gherardi created over eighty locations, including the Via Veneto, the dome of Saint Peter's with the staircase leading up to it, and various nightclubs.^[16] However, other sequences were shot on location such as the party at the aristocrats' castle filmed in the real Bassano di Sutri palace north of Rome. (Some of the servants, waiters, and guests were played by real aristocrats.) Fellini combined constructed sets with location shots, depending on script requirements—a real location often "gave birth to the modified scene and, consequently, the newly constructed set."^[17] The film's last scenes where the monster fish is pulled out of the sea and Marcello waves goodbye to Paola (the teenage "Umbrian angel") were shot on location at Passo Oscuro, a small resort town situated on the Italian coast 30 kilometers from Rome.^{[lower-alpha 2]}

Fellini scrapped a major sequence that would have involved the relationship of Marcello with Dolores, an older writer living in a tower, to be played by 1930s Academy Award-winning actress Luise Rainer.^[18] If the director's dealings with Rainer "who used to involve Fellini in futile discussion" were problematic, biographer Kezich argues that while rewriting the screenplay, the Dolores character grew "hyperbolic" and Fellini decided to jettison "the entire story line."^[19]

The scene in the Trevi Fountain was shot over a week in winter: in March according to the BBC,^[20] in late January according to Anita Ekberg.^[21] Fellini claimed that Ekberg stood in the cold water in her dress for hours without any trouble while Mastroianni had to wear a wetsuit beneath his clothes - to no avail. It was only after the actor "polished off a bottle of vodka" and "was completely pissed" that Fellini could shoot the scene.^[22]

Paparazzo

One of Secchiaroli's famous photos of Aïché Nana's striptease at Rugantino in 1958, which inspired Federico Fellini with a famous and controversial scene from the film La Dolce Vita

The character of Paparazzo, the news photographer (Walter Santesso), was inspired by photojournalist Tazio Secchiaroli^[23] and is the origin of the word paparazzi, used in many languages to describe intrusive photographers.^[24] As to the origin of the character's name itself, Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella argues that although "it is indeed an Italian family name, the word is probably a corruption of the word papataceo, a large and bothersome mosquito. Ennio Flaiano, the film's co-screenwriter and creator of Paparazzo, reports that he took the name from a character in a novel by George Gissing."^[25] Gissing's character, Signor Paparazzo, is found in his travel book, By the Ionian Sea (1901).^{[26][lower-alpha 3]}

Seven episodes

The most common interpretation of the film is a mosaic, its parts linked by the protagonist, Marcello Rubini, a journalist.^[28] The seven episodes are:

1. Marcello's evening with the heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimée)
2. His long, frustrating night with the American actress Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) that ends in the Trevi fountain at dawn
3. His reunion with the intellectual Steiner (Alain Cuny) their relationship is divided into three sequences spread over the film: a) the encounter, b) Steiner's party and c) Steiner's tragedy
4. The fake miracle
5. His father's visit/Steiner's Party
6. The aristocrat's party/Steiner's tragedy
7. The "orgy" at the beach house^[29]

Interrupting the seven episodes is the restaurant sequence with the angelic Paola; they are framed by a prologue (Jesus over Rome) and epilogue (the monster fish) giving the film its innovative and symmetrically symbolic structure.^[2] The evocations are: seven deadly sins, seven sacraments, seven virtues, seven days of creation. Other critics disagree, Peter Bondanella argues that "any critic of La Dolce Vita not mesmerized by the magic number seven will find it almost impossible to organize the numerous sequences on a strictly numerological basis".^[30]

An aesthetic of disparity

The critic Robert Richardson suggests that the originality of La Dolce Vita lies in a new form of film narrative that mines "an aesthetic of disparity".^[31] Abandoning traditional plot and conventional "character development", Fellini and co-screenwriters Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli forged a cinematic narrative that rejected continuity, unnecessary explanations and narrative logic in favour of seven non-linear encounters between Marcello, a kind of Dantesque Pilgrim and an underworld of 120 characters. The encounters build up a cumulative impression on the viewer that finds resolution in an "overpowering sense of the disparity between what life has been or could be, and what it actually is".^[32]

In a device used earlier in his films, Fellini orders the disparate succession of sequences as movements from evening to dawn. Also employed as an ordering device is the image of a downward spiral that Marcello sets in motion when descending the first of several staircases (including ladders) that open and close episodes. The upshot is that the film's aesthetic form, rather than its content, embodies the theme of Rome as a moral wasteland.

Box office

The film was a big hit in Europe with 13,617,148 admissions in Italy and 2,956,094 admissions in France,^[45] for a combined 16,573,242 tickets sold in both countries. The film had the second most admissions for an Italian film behind War and Peace and was one of the top 10 most watched films in Italy.

The film earned $6 million in rentals in the United States and Canada in its original release^[46] and was the highest-grossing foreign language film at the US box office.^[47] The film was re-released in North America in 1966 by American International Pictures and earned $1.5 million in rentals.^[48] The total gross was $19,516,348.^[49]

Censorship

Perceived by the Catholic Church as a parody of the second coming of Jesus, the opening scene and the film were condemned by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in 1960.^[50] Subject to widespread censorship, the film was banned in Spain, until the death of Franco in 1975.^[26] Umberto Tupini, the Minister of Culture of the Tambroni government censored it and other "shameful films". In Portugal, the film took ten years to pass through its censors and be released in the country (this was due to the censorship that the country suffered during the years of Estado Novo).

Awards and recognition

The New York Times described La Dolce Vita as "one of the most widely seen and acclaimed European movies of the 1960s".^[51] It was nominated for four Academy Awards, and won one for Best Costume Design: Black-and-White. La Dolce Vita also earned the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.^[4][52] The film won best foreign language film award at New York Film Critics Circle awards and National Board of Review awards. It was also nominated for a BAFTA award in best film from any source category.

Entertainment Weekly voted it the 6th Greatest film of all time in 1999.^[53] The Village Voice ranked the film at number 112 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.^[54] The film was included in "The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" in 2002.^[55] In 2010, the film was ranked #11 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema".^[56] In the British Film Institute's 2002 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made, La Dolce Vita ranked 24th in critics' poll^[57] and 14th in directors' poll.^[58] In the 2012 version of the list La Dolce Vita ranked 39th in critics' poll and 37th in directors' poll. In January 2002, the film was voted at No. 28 on the list of the "Top 100 Essential Films of All Time" by the National Society of Film Critics.^[59][60] The film was Voted at No. 59 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008.^[61] In 2007, the film was ranked at No. 19 by The Guardian's readers poll on the list of "40 greatest foreign films of all time".^[62] In 2010, The Guardian ranked the film 23rd in its list of 25 greatest arthouse films.^[63] In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter ranked the film 2nd among 69 counted winners of the Palme d'Or to date, concluding "What’s eternal is Fellini’s melancholy realization that behind modern-day sin, redemption, distraction and the come-hither facade of the sweet life, there lurks only emptiness."^[64] The film ranked 10th in BBC's 2018 list of The 100 greatest foreign language films voted by 209 film critics from 43 countries around the world.^[65] In 2021 the film was ranked at No. 6 on Time Out magazine's list of The 100 best movies of all time.^[66]