The dreamer

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was a box-office triumph in Italy in 1960. It made $1.5 million at the box office in three months — more than Gone With the Wind had. ‘It was the making of me,’ said Fellini. It was also the making of Marcello Mastroianni as the screen idol with a curiously impotent sex appeal. No other film captured so memorably the flashbulb glitz of Italy’s postwar ‘economic miracle’ and its consumer boom of Fiat 500s and Gaggia espresso machines. Unsurprisingly, the Vatican objected to the scene where Mastroianni makes love to the Swedish diva Anita Ekberg (who died earlier this year at the age of 83) in the waters of the Trevi fountain. Sixties Rome became a fantasy of the erotic ‘sweet life’ thanks in part to that scene.

After La Dolce Vita, Fellini found himself at a creative loss and hung a sign above his desk: ‘NOW WHAT?’ Sophia Loren’s movie-mogul husband, Carlo Ponti, persuaded him to contribute to Boccaccio ’70, a collection of lewd short films inspired by the medieval Decameron, but it was a critical failure. At the end of 1961, still in ‘creative limbo’, Fellini began work on 8½, his eighth and a half film; it was to be a signpost in his development as a magician-director.

Again, Mastroianni was the lead actor, but 8½ is a very different film from La Dolce Vita. In gleeful narrative disarray, it returns to British cinemas this month in a version restored from the original negatives. Watching it the other day at the BFI, I felt I might levitate out of my seat as the movie scissors giddily backwards and forwards in time, with dreamlike sequences from Fellini’s Rimini childhood morphing into stylised fantasy sequences from 1940s Hollywood.

Daringly, Fellini disavowed the gritty actuality of Italian neorealism (Bicycle Thieves; Rome, Open City) to conjure what he called an ‘intoxicating, lucid dreaminess’.