I'm so glad to see so many reviews about this movie. I plan on reading all of them but, after having seen it after so many years ( I first saw it when it came out in 1960 and loved it) I feel the urge to immediately clarify one point: this movie, like all the others he made,is autobiographical. Fellini, like all great artists, is always talking about himself. He is like a pig in his through (no offense intended)who sits in it, taking pleasure in the warmth emanating from his own ejections, all the while trying to give meaning to himself and his feelings. And wondering why other people find interesting what he is saying. The themes are always the same: the need for incestuous maternal love, the adventure of leaving the little provincial town, the reminiscences of his (much idolized) boyhood, an absent father figure that he tries to summon up, a purifying young female figure,etc. etc. This was his greatest success and it is so because he put so much of himself into it while casting a cynical (but not overly harsh) eye on his fellow men. To really understand this movie one needs to think of it not like a series of episodes illustrating a decaying societies but more like a large, very large canvas,or better yet a large fresco, showing, not without some sympathy, the ebullient, multi-language society in which a smart young man from a provincial little town in Italy is trying to find his ways and a meaning for his life. A great movie, not unlike a modern Divine Comedy or Ulysses with an Italian Leopold Bloom navigating and getting lost in a sweet, intoxicating modern days Rome, not dissimilar from the one he later described in Satyricon.
Review of La Dolce Vita
