His pursuit ends at dawn when she wades into the Trevi Fountain and he wades after her, idealizing her into all women, into The Woman she remains forever just out of reach. Peters, into the bowels of a nightclub, and into the Roman night, where wild dogs howl and she howls back. An early sequence finds Marcello covering the arrival in Rome of an improbably buxom movie star ( Anita Ekberg), and consumed with desire. If the opening and closing scenes are symmetrical, so are many others, matching the sacred and profane and casting doubts on both. She makes typing motions to remind him, but he does not remember, shrugs, and turns away. At the end, across a beach, he sees the shy girl he met one day when he went to the country in search of peace to write his novel. The helicopter circles as Marcello tries to get the phone numbers of three sunbathing beauties. During both scenes there are failures of communication. Two Christ symbols: the statue "beautiful" but false, the fish "ugly" but real. The famous opening scene, as a statue of Christ is carried above Rome by a helicopter, is matched with the close, in which fisherman on the beach find a sea monster in their nets. Peter's dome, climbs to a choir loft, and to the high-rise apartment of Steiner ( Alain Cuny), the intellectual who is his hero. Marcello goes down into subterranean nightclubs, hospital parking lots, the hooker's hovel and an ancient crypt. And we begin to understand the film's structure: A series of nights and dawns, descents and ascents. The episode ends not in decadence but in sleep we can never be sure that Marcello has had sex with anyone.Īnother dawn. In a nightclub, he picks up a promiscuous society beauty ( Anouk Aimee), and together they visit the basement lair of a prostitute. He has a suicidal fiancee ( Magali Noel) at home. The movie leaps from one visual extravaganza to another, following Marcello as he chases down stories and women.
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