Slight spoilers in the last paragraph.

Our modern malaise is all-encompassing self-pity. I went through it last year: what was the point of wanting things if you were never going to get them anyway? In the throes of my self-absorbed sorrow, I didn’t notice that I had no ambition to begin with. Finding something to care about got me out of that horrible dark place, but every day, I come across more people my age – kids who haven’t even hit twenty yet – diagnosed with depression, although nothing monumental has happened to them, to us. Why are you so unhappy? I don’t know.

Watching La Dolce Vita was like coming across yet another one of those depressed kids, or…

Jesus flies above a Rome that is elegant but decadent. There is no strict character development in La Dolce Vita, just a slither of a story about a hedonistic reporter getting lost amidst an amoral landscape. The film embraces the shallowest of lifestyles to reveal the emptiness of it all. Fellini's Italy is an enchanting place where the nights are alive, but everything in La Dolce Vita is fake. News and reality is all constructed, as characters seek new adventures in a city deemed tranquil and bland. La Dolce Vita contains so many characters, essentially it is cavalcade of the people who wander through a certain social class. These people are disconnected from the world. Their lives are shallow and…

"Don't be like me. Salvation doesn't lie within four walls. I'm too serious to be a dilettante and too much a dabbler to be a professional. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected."

It's always intimidating to try and write about something considered to be one of the best films ever made. Regardless of how great it might be, sometimes it can be hard to have fun without a personal access point. It's like staring at the Mona Lisa: sure it's a nice painting and it's easy to appreciate on that level, but what does it have to say about my own subjective reality?

So it…

It’s for films like this that I become more and more confident about Fellini being one of the best directors of all time. Fellini has a unique essence when it comes to direction and execution, and in La Dolce Vita he reinforces this essence in a noticeable way.

The film explores themes that deepen in the search for a purpose, the struggle with disappointment and the confrontation between desires and social expectations. The way Fellini portrays the lifestyle of the elite class made me completely indulge in the reflection on the nature of happiness, the repercussions of the "excessive" and the sense of detachment experienced by those individuals trapped in a morally ambiguous and superficial world. In addition to all this…

"We must get beyond passions, like a great work of art. In such miraculous harmony. We should love each other outside of time... detached."

𝐀 𝐁𝐄𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐈𝐅𝐔𝐋𝐋𝐘 𝐇𝐀𝐔𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐅𝐈𝐋𝐌
La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini is about the sadness hidden inside the sweetness of life. This beautiful film feels even more relevant now than it must have felt in 1960 because we live in a culture that constantly tells us to want more attention, experiences, success, etc. And yet La Dolce Vita understands that desire has no finish line. Once one desire is fulfilled, another immediately takes its place. This film is about the gap between the life we live and the life we secretly long for. It is about the…