In “Subtitled,” Emmett Chung ’27 explores world cinema through reviews of non-English films. 

“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” -Bong Joon Ho

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

The phrase “La dolce vita,” or “the sweet life” evokes romanticized clichés about Italy: umbrellas, Aperol spritzes and long afternoons. However, in Federico Fellini’s “La dolce vita” (1960), “the sweet life” seems to be an unreachable horizon and a bitterly ironic description of society — one that lacks a moral center and values nothing except mindless hedonism.

The film follows journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) as he travels through Rome’s high society in search of “the sweet life.” Eschewing a traditional linear narrative, the film consists of disconnected sequences. Each scene features the same characters and unfold in roughly chronological order, yet they add up to a thematic whole rather than merely a progression of events. These sequences feature drinking, partying and lovemaking mixed with murder, disappointment and denial. The implicit question it poses: Is this what “the sweet life” looks like?

In “La dolce vita,” parties and hedonism only bring people physically together; everyone remains emotionally and mentally isolated. If anything, the characters are pitiful, unable to see that they are neither living “the sweet life” nor able to ever attain it. “The sweet life” seems to define a world that isn’t immoral, but rather amoral.

Denial defines many of the vignettes. The women in Marcello’s life disappear, though mostly because of his own actions. He meets and cruises around Rome with a woman named Maddalena (Anouk Aimée), yet when she later asks him to marry her, he refuses to answer her. Marcello begins the film with a fiancée, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), but the two of them eventually get in an argument, and he throws her out of his car. And in one of the film’s best-known sequences, Marcello meets a Swedish actress, Sylvia (Anita Ekberg). After spending the day at Roman landmarks, he follows her into the Trevi Fountain. A kiss, the moment toward which the sequence seems to build, never happens, as the film cuts to the next morning with a wide shot of Marcello and Sylvia standing in the fountain in broad daylight. The tension evaporates; everything that came before between Marcello and Sylvia now appears hollow. “The sweet life” cannot build human connection, only empty gestures.

While the film deals with morality, it doesn’t moralize. “La dolce vita” denies its characters intimacy — physical and emotional — reflecting a world that is above all, empty. Marcello’s lack of intimate connection isn’t comeuppance for his personal lack of morals. After all, how could karmic punishment exist in a society with no concept of right or wrong? 

The film instead suggests that his search was a fool’s errand; there can be no intimacy without morality, and no one possesses the latter.

Marcello strives to emulate his friend Steiner (Alain Cuny), a stereotypical intellectual hipster with whom Marcello engages in philosophical conversation between puffs of his cigarette. However, Steiner eventually commits a brutal and unexpected crime: murder-suicide of his children. Steiner, the paragon of “the sweet life,” ultimately existed outside even a basic moral framework that would recognize murder as wrong. 

The response to Steiner’s crime is almost as disturbing as the murders themselves. When Steiner’s unknowing wife returns home, photographers swarm her, including Marcello’s photographer, Paparazzo (Walter Santesso), whose name embodies the etymology of the modern word “paparazzi.” A police officer sequesters Steiner’s wife inside his squad car to privately inform her, but the photographers chase after them as they drive away — a scene eerily plausible in 2025, albeit with bystanders holding cell phones.

Contrasting with every other scene is the “intermezzo” sequence halfway through the film. Sitting at a beachside restaurant, Marcello talks to the young girl clearing tables, Paola (Valeria Ciangottini). Paola tells him how she misses her hometown of Perugia, in an implicit rebuke of the decadence of Rome. He tells her she looks like an “angel” before the scene ends. In a film full of unlikeable people and empty relationships, Paola is the best opportunity for genuine human connection that Marcello encounters. Their conversation is brief, but she appears one more time.

In the final scene, a visibly older Marcello emerges from an all-night party to see fishermen dragging an enormous dead “monster” to shore. The creature is clearly ugly and bloated, but it’s difficult to describe its features — just like how the world of the film is clearly amoral and vacant, but it’s also difficult to describe its aspects.

Marcello then looks away from the creature to see Paola gesturing at him, but they can’t hear each other over the sound of the waves. He fatalistically throws his hands up, then walks away.

Has Marcello learned anything? As the audience, we’ve learned how futile the search for the “sweet life” has been, but even when offered a second chance at true human connection — which Paola embodies — he can’t even be bothered to try. Has the fatalism of the world Marcello inhabits left him resigned to indifference? Does he believe that human connection is still even possible? The gap in the sand between Marcello and Paola reflects a literal gulf between the two characters, but also between two worlds: that of ambivalent hedonism and that where a moral center may exist. 

“La dolce vita” reflects that the magic and power of cinema comes from images, not plot. It exemplifies that middle school writing class cliché: “Show, don’t tell.” Fellini’s parade of overstimulating, vibrant visuals nevertheless conveys a world that, beneath its glamorous sheen, is nihilistic, unmoored and isolating. 

Yet as unabashedly bleak as the film is about Marcello’s world, there is hope for our own. The sea creature symbolizes everything wrong in Marcello’s society. But when we look into its bulging black eyes, we can also see the flaws within our own. If we had been standing in Marcello’s place, would we have tried harder to hear what Paola had to say?

You can watch “La dolce vita” for free with ads here.