Sometimes, just hearing the music to a certain movie puts me into the mood for the experience of watching a film. I rented a collection of Nina Rota's music from the library the other day and lost myself in the tastes of Rota's stylings. Besides creating the score for "The Godfather" films, he also did "Romeo and Juliet", "Death on the Nile", and many Fellini films. After listening to all that great music, I was influence to watch "La Dolce Vita" tonight. For those of you who don't know, the story surrounds Marchello Mastroianni as he vainly tries to make sense of his life in the swirl of a series of events set in Rome.
As in many Fellini films, music is essential and Nina Rota helped create that vision for 15 of Fellini's films. Many directors have their favorite musical authors, Hitchcock had Bernard Herman, Spielberg - John Williams, Tim Burton - Danny Elfman. Music is part of the emotion of a movie and directors seem to gravitate to a particular voice that relates best to their own.
The film portrays events surrounding a reporter played by Mastroianni who is disillusioned with life. He drifts through a series of evenings each that starts out with much promise, from sexual encounters to supernatural Mother Mary sightings. During the coarse of these events, the emptiness of his life begins to permeate till by dawn he has had to take his girl friend to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, identify the body of his best friend, gotten beat up for a girl he never touched. Through these illusions Mastroinni travels looking for truth but never having to tell us that this is his goal. Fellini leaves the preaching out of these moral situations and does not try to poke the obvious in our faces like most good American directors would have done with the same material.
Through out this mix of moments Nina Rota makes three dimensional the imagery with his music. During a night of dancing and partying Marchello tries in vain to woo Anita Ekberg, almost old fashion in his approach he is pushed aside by the Satyr stylings of her friend Frankie who kicks the band into high gear in pseudo Jazz fashion and leads the revelers through the Roman ruins with a frenzy. Marchello is left in the dust. From jazz to an Italian concept of Rock-a-billy, the music swiftly shifts. Through it all, twinges of Nina Rota's classical Italian upbringing and world music concepts seep together to create something that is old and new at the same time. Just listen to the opening chords to the movie, classical music with a twinge of chinese sensibilities! If it all sounds familiar, it's only because composers like Danny Elfman have taken up the torch and channel Nina Rota. Sometime just listen to "Pee Wee's Big Adventure and "8 1/2" . Do it blind folded. Passages could easily be swapped. Don't tell me that composer Henry Mancinni didn't clue into some of those pseudo jazz styling himself from Nina Rota. Hell, Henry made a career of almost doing jazz. No offense, I love it all. Sometimes just hearing a bit of music can make me hunger to return to a great film. Film is like travel and music is what carries me there.
-brad yarhouse