Parents' Guide to

La Dolce Vita

By Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 15+

'60s Fellini classic has sex, drinking, suicide.

Movie NR 1960 174 minutes
La Dolce Vita Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

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age 14+

Based on 1 parent review

Alice H.
Alice H. Adult
May 15, 2017
age 14+

Good film classic to build your film repertoire

This is a lonnnggg film (almost 3 hours) made up of episodes throughout the life of a male gossip journalist. I wouldn't recommend for anyone under the age of 14 mostly because it is very long with complex topics that would/could go other the heads of the younger audience making it boring and difficult to process, as well as dealing with difficult topics like suicide and death. time stamps: domestic abuse/violence 49 minutes in, attempted suicide 1 hour and 17 minutes in skip to 1 hour and 21 minutes, in transphobia 1 hour and 34 minutes in, domestic abuse 2 hours and 15 minutes in, murder-suicide/death of a friend 2 hours and 17 minutes in skip to 2 hours and 23 minutes in, animal corpse 2 hours and 44 minutes in until credits
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What's the Story?

In LA DOLCE VITA, Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a reporter on the celebrity beat, hangs out at Roman cafes and nightclubs looking for news of starlets and other celebrities. Marcello flirts with the attractive women he encounters through work. He has sex with a wealthy partygoer (Anouk Aimee), whose detachment intrigues him. His live-in girlfriend endures the philandering, certain that one day he'll give the women up for marriage, children, and her smothering affection. While waiting, she overdoses on prescription medication, recovering soon after. When a Swedish bombshell movie star (Anita Ekberg) arrives in Rome, Marcello woos her, then recedes when her interest wanes, but not before famously wading in the Trevi Fountain and being punched by her muscular boyfriend. But Marcello is better than all that and he reminds himself of the better man he believes himself to be when he visits an admired writer friend, a man who represents the integrity and seriousness Marcello yearns for. When the man later shoots his small children and himself, Marcello's aspiration to literary heights vanishes and he becomes a publicist for high-paying celebrity clients, organizing bored jet setters into performing a striptease here and having an orgy there. (An orgy is planned but never happens.) In the end he's confronted with a moment of what might be genuine feeling but seems too far gone to respond.

Is It Any Good?

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La Dolce Vita ("Sweet Life" in English) has a vibrance that lives beyond the details of the late 1950s that made it seem ahead of its time then and dated now. When the sharp observations of Federico Fellini were introduced to American audiences in the form of this episodic Italian satire, the movie became a hit. Granted he picks easy targets: the idle rich, the simple-minded and hedonistic aristocracy, the idolized world of Hollywood and the journalists and photographers who put them all on pedestals, but Fellini scolds them kindly. His are not the rights and wrongs of the Bible -- Fellini has nothing against sex. His prostitute may be the single most straightforward and likable character in the film. It's illusions about sex, and important things that sex can be used to replace -- like love, loyalty, sincerity -- that get his attention. He targets what we now might nostalgically view as innocent days when reporters covering nonsense for a paycheck actually still dreamed of writing great novels because people actually still read them. What makes Fellini stand out from the crowd is the way he sees those frenzied earlier days of publicity and marketing forces as the onset of greater decay, forces we now know would eventually create Kardashians and their like. Felini sees the future and it's us. In fact, the origin of the word "paparazzi" (plural in Italian) comes from the actual surname, Paparazzo, of one of the dogged celebrity photographers in the film.

Mastroianni is the perfect combination of gentlemanly, seductive, shallow, intelligent, beautiful, weak, and strong to make the down-low journalist hunting for celebrity news believable as someone who aspires to something greater. When the writer friend he idolizes kills his small children and himself, Marcello's fragile illusions are shattered. All hope of giving up La Dolce Vita for higher achievement and self-respect evaporates. In the "fun" of the bored socialites, aristocrats, and celebrities, Fellini conveys post-World War II desperation. People who managed to overcome life and death circumstances when the world was at war struggle in Fellini's world to inject meaning into peace time. Under those circumstances, he suggests, no amount of drinking, sex, stripping, or flirting gives anyone any real pleasure at all. An unconventional narrative design may confuse younger viewers or just plain leave them cold. But the movie is not unstructured. It opens and closes with bookends of blocked communication -- pretty neat for a movie about a reporter. La Dolce Vita won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Director.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about the way that at first Marcello's life looks glamorous in La Dolce Vita but as the action continues his life seems more desperate and silly. What are some of the signs that he's not happy with the direction he takes?

  • How do you think Fellini's portrayal of celebrity compares with the way the media treat celebrities today?

  • Does this movie stand the test of time? Why or why not? Are the themes still relevant?

  • How would you remake this movie?

Movie Details

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