La Dolce Vita

The films of Fellini are also literary masterpieces in the Joycean vein, flowing with the rich, chaotic material of life -- we are creatures driven by the desire for self-exploration and also a desire for the beautiful, light life, the sweet life in which everything is dreamy and lovely. Wouldn't it be lovely, as Audrey Hepburn's father sings in My Fair Lady.

the marble staircase which flows and flutters and magically ascends upward, as the nape or lobelia of a darling woman's neck, before they kiss a kiss to build a dream on is something that borders on the divine, and the irony may lay in the fact that they are floating up the Vatican, is it?

Sweet, sweet exploration and the delirious songs of youth, the desire to grow up and lead a responsible life, and yet seeing the corruption in adulthood as conformity and boredom is something that is rather immature to say the least. Yet, as in 9 1/2, Fellini expresses for us our daemonic desire to be very much at the center, having others dance around us and not much caring what happens except when the hoodlums come to haunt our protected lives.