Bumptious with aspiration and with no particularly evident talent beyond drawing, Fellini had escaped the purgatorial seaside province of Rimini and found work in Florence illustrating comic strips, which led to a trek through the Italian countryside as a dogsbody in a vaudeville troupe-painting stage flats, playing bits, writing sketches-until an opportunity to write movie gags brought him to Rome in 1942. It continues to speak to us in part because, for all Fellini’s inventiveness, La dolce vita remained true to his peculiar take on the verism that defined his apprenticeship. It is now a more humanistic film too, because, having been there and done much of that, we know its people more intimately than did the first generation of viewers, who were gawkers at and not survivors of the spectacle. Just as we are more likely now to register how funny it is and how tidily structured, we can hardly fail to see how it augurs our obsessions with the loss of privacy and the rise of virtuality, the deadening of the senses and the addiction to technology, the corruption of media, the lust for fame, and the waning of lust when acculturation trumps individual agency. Time has sustained La dolce vita, setting loose themes that underscore twenty-first-century dilemmas that were of little or no consequence in 1960. In truth, it now seems more shocking, or rather shocking in a more profound way. Detractors complain that the film isn’t shocking anymore-that time has reduced it to little more than a fascinating souvenir of another day. Today the film’s revolutionary purview may appear tame, especially themes that rankled the church and bluenoses: moral decay, moneyed monotony, religious irreverence, loveless coupling. After a dozen years of neorealism, which cataloged the privations of postwar Italy, Fellini reinvented Rome as a caravan of dreams or nightmares, debauched, pathetic, yet perfidiously appealing, a tourist attraction and also a recruitment station for the inferno. Back then, it invited us to deplore the exhibition of the rich and depraved, while encouraging us to join them on the Via Veneto. One of the most prescient of all films, it now triggers a different set of keywords than it did in the early 1960s. His best films live and breathe and morph, none more so than the picaresque La dolce vita (1960), which may be his most nearly perfect, astutely rueful, least sentimental work: an improbably entertaining, three-hour tragicomedy about people frantically trying, without much success, to stay entertained. But then we must disown him like a shameful memory: the grandiosity, nostalgia, and hallucinations the promenade of lanky, bosomy, and Chaplinesque women the transvestites and gargoyles-so that later we can, with trepidation and longing, confront again the colorful ringmaster from Rimini and his forty-year pilgrimage in cinema, and find that we were right the first time, that Fellini really is an artist for most seasons. We come to him in youth, rosily impressionable, hungry for allegory, susceptible to the idea of life as a circus, complete with and even dominated by a freak show. To savor Federico Fellini it may be worthwhile to temporarily spurn him.
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