Federico Fellini’s rereleased film brilliantly captures postwar Rome and its denizens as they tumble headlong into hedonistic excess – and secret melancholy
For a dizzying moment in the disorientated postwar era, cinema and Federico Fellini put Rome at the centre of the world; now his early masterpiece from 1960, La Dolce Vita, is rereleased as part of a retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. It’s a film with Fellini’s genius for revealing dreamlike and surreal images everywhere, especially that extraordinary image of Christ being helicoptered over the city, apparently on its way to be delivered to the pope.
The movie finds Rome in a hysterical, excitable but also somehow desperate mood – the mood of “Il Boom”, that economic and cultural revival in which
Italy was euphorically eager to forget the catastrophe of fascism and defeat, and to start all over again, in a headlong rush of modernity and excitement: movies,
music,
fashion and style. It is as if Rome’s new contemporary sexiness and hedonism has revived the spirit of pre-Christian Rome and pagan ritual. But this coexists with a secret melancholy, a spiritual bust to go with the boom: ennui and fear.