La Dolce Vita

Director: Federico Fellini, Federico Fellini, Federico Fellini, Federico Fellini, Federico Fellini, Federico Fellini

1960 / 170min / DCP

Marcello Mastroianni’s tabloid journalist, the central character in Fellini’s teeming, carnivalesque depiction of bacchanalia among the culturati of c.1960 AD Rome, is handsome, stylish, a hit with the ladies, and enjoys an open invite to every hip soirée in town. But as we follow him through a week’s worth of the late nights, orgiastic cocktail parties, and blasé pickups that make up his “sweet life,” a bitter aftertaste begins to cut through. An arthouse phenomenon that Martin Scorsese dubbed “the film that conquered the world,” its perspective on the new predicaments posed by affluent postwar consumer society recalls a line from Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It”: “The problem of leisure/ What to do for pleasure?”