Federico Fellini is often lauded for the highly imaginative quality of his films. Indeed, so powerful is the association of the Italian director with the surreal and the fantastic that his last name has been incorporated into the English language as an adjective describing the aforementioned characteristics. However, looking below the often-dazzling surface of his films, one finds that Fellini’s cinema frequently includes a highly critical social component. In point of fact, perhaps his most famous work, the 1960 production La Dolce Vita, can be interpreted less as a “shockumentary” exposing the sensational doings of the Roman jet set and more the story of one man’s failure to find a moral compass in an increasingly fragmented world. It is this theme that makes the film so compelling even today rather than a mere relic of its era.

The film’s protagonist, tabloid journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), is a man at the height of his powers, engaged to the attractive Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) and employed in a seemingly glamorous job in which he rubs shoulders with the rich and famous. Despite his evident success, the hollowness in Marcello’s life grows increasingly more evident as the film progresses, exposing the essential shabbiness of his existence. This inner turbulence is outwardly conveyed by the film’s episodic structure.

For example, Marcello’s journalistic career is based less on providing useful information to the public and more on cultivating the wealthy for scandalmongering purposes. Despite being engaged, he has no qualms about engaging in sexual liaisons with other women, such as the heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) and the British artist Jane (Audrey McDonald). In turn, his fiancée Emma is overbearing, smothering, and manipulative; she purposely overdoses on sleeping pills because Marcello has spent a night on the town (initially for work, but later, unbeknownst to her, with Maddalena). When accompanying him to cover a purported sighting of the Madonna, Emma treats Marcello as if he were an infant, ignoring his discomfort with her domineering behavior. Her love, as Marcello states during one especially bitter argument, is basically selfish rather than selfless in nature.

Marcello seems to yearn for a significant change in his life, both emotionally and intellectually, groping blindly for a better way. In the case of the former, he pursues the American actress Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), hoping to find in her some type of female ideal but encountering instead only an illusion. Indeed, during the famous Trevi Fountain sequence, Marcello addresses Sylvia less as a real woman and more as the living incarnation of a primordial fertility goddess. Blinded by his own preconceptions, he is unable to fathom that she is not the Platonic embodiment of eternal femininity but rather a shallow, self-absorbed media creation incapable of responding to his deep inner needs. Likewise, an attempt to develop a relationship with the promiscuous socialite Maddalena is similarly frustrated by Marcello’s lack of insight. When they accidently meet again at the aristocrats’ party in a castle, he declares his love for her by means of a literal echo chamber while, in an adjoining room, she passionately falls into the arms of another man.

Friendship with the intellectual Steiner (Alain Cuny) seems to provide Marcello with a rare opportunity to cultivate a different side of himself. From conversations about church organs to soirées with Rome’s cosmopolitan bohemians, the relationship offers Marcello the chance to experience an alternative environment based on non-materialistic values and enclosed within a comfortable middle-class setting. Steiner himself is a model of bourgeois domesticity, whose seemingly stable marriage provides a viable alternative to Marcello’s neurotic associations with women. Finally, he also encourages Marcello to direct his writing talents in a literary rather than journalistic direction.

At one point, however, Steiner confesses to Marcello that he himself feels a certain tension between the stability of a well-ordered life of ease and the pull toward a less secure existence dedicated to otherworldly pursuits. Nevertheless, it is a profound shock to Marcello’s Weltanschauung when he learns that Steiner, his cultural beau idéal, has murdered his two children and then committed suicide. Once again, Marcello’s efforts to change his life for the better have proven to be a futile chase after a will-o’-the-wisp. Steiner, like Sylvia, has been exposed as an idol with feet of clay.

Deprived of any positive outlet for his energies, Marcello is reduced to sadistically abusing an aspiring starlet at the “orgy” that concludes the film. By this time, he has definitively abandoned his literary pretensions in favor of working as a publicity agent: His self-alienation is now complete. As this drunken night of beach-side revelry comes to a close, his attention is attracted by an adolescent girl who had waited on him at a trattoria earlier in the film. The two are separated, however, by an inlet where her words are swallowed by the moaning of the wind and the pounding of the waves; their subsequent mutual attempt at communicating via hand gestures is also in vain. Marcello has reached a dead end, his authentic self now permanently beyond reach. He half-drunkenly stumbles away into the approaching dawn, never to raise himself out of the spiritual swamp that now engulfs him.

While Michelangelo Antonioni is generally considered the supreme portraitist of alienation in late-20th-century cinema, Fellini has equaled him in this brilliant depiction of a man at the end of his tether. Marcello has achieved the goals aspired to by the Western middle class: a successful career, a solid income, a committed romantic relationship, and a life full of diversions. Despite all of this, he is singularly unhappy and increasingly unfulfilled. His material well-being has led paradoxically to a growing estrangement from his inner self, one echoed in the lives of many real-life Marcellos during the past half-century. Sadly, the dichotomy depicted in this film has only grown wider with the passing years.