It was bound to happen sooner or later. I was somewhat lukewarm on Variety Lights and The White Sheik; both films had things to like about them, but neither made me look forward to watching the remaining dozen films in Criterion’s collection dedicated to Federico Fellini. The third film in the collection, I Vitelloni, didn’t immediately seem like a big step up. As in the previous two films, we get men behaving badly (towards women, but not only), feeling entitled to all the best life has to offer and feeling sorry for themselves when they don’t get it. They’re more grating because of how the film plays a lilting Nino Rota score that suggests we’re to consider all of this as a lark: boys being boys, that sort of thing. But then, around the halfway point of I Vitelloni, something changes: a note of desolate sadness creeps in, a despair underlying the laddish performativity of it all, slowly but surely becoming the film’s dominant tone.