Movies Abroad: LA. Dolce Vita

Hollywood is forever traversing the world to make on-location pictures redolent of the sounds and smells of the atmosphere beneath the story. Now the tables have been turned. Playing at the Venice Film Festival last week to approving cheers was an Italian film called Smog, the first Italian feature film ever made on location in the U.S. Its message seems to be that people who live in glass houses are throwing their lives away, and the film itself throws quite a few rocks smack through the glassy eyes of Hollywood. It is about as focused as the rest of the world generally appears through the lenses of Hollywood, and is thus fine revenge as well as funny satire.

The Last Frontier. An Italian lawyer, stopping over in Los Angeles on his way to Mexico, wanders through the city, meets rich Italian immigrants, becomes involved, and eventually likes what he sees. But the story is of less significance than the cumulative effect of the picture’s vignettes—some sharp, some silly, all sardonic. The hero, stopping to rest, sits on the bumper of an automobile. Suddenly he rises and leaps away, just as another car smashes into the bumper—demonstrating how Americans park their expensive cars. At” a bar, Italian artists are prostituting their genius doing caricatures of sloppy rich American drunks.

Meeting an Italian career girl with her own thriving business, the hero goes with her to a home she is about to buy, a hilltop viewmaster, 90% glass, with a huge swimming pool and theatrical lighting. “This is the last frontier,” says the lawyer. Says the girl: “It’s marvelous when there’s no smog.” It is clear that her life is just one long lungful of metaphysical smog. They go to a wild cocktail party full of space scientists, fags, wags, and a U.S. Senator who says, “Very nice talking with you” to close a conversation that consisted of two hellos.

In the end, the lawyer finds himself in the home of an architect. It is a plastic bubble swelling precariously from the side of a cliff. “A home is a place where man must live harmoniously with nature,” says the architect. The lawyer gets lost in the house. He pounds frantically on the plastic walls, calling for help, as the camera draws back to show him there, like a fly dying in a bottle.

Playing Themselves. Made last year by Director Franco Rossi (The Woman in the Painting), Smog, in his words, is the story of “the future borghese [bourgeois] headed for ultimate material prosperity. I foresee this soon in Italy, and I wanted to show where we are headed.” Director Federico Fellini has foreseen pretty much the same thing, and Smog is a kind of ground-fog version of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Like Fellini, Rossi weights his work with symbolism and tells his story in round after round of parties. Like Fellini, he used actual people playing themselves in a picture depicting their own degradation, including Playboy Peter Howard who, curiously enough, was host at the Roman orgy in 1958 that inspired a scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.