I did a little Federico Fellini movie marathon this past week. Well, not so little actually, considering the length of his films (La Dolce Vita is almost 3 hours long). I saw four excellent movies:
8 1/2 (1963)
Giulietta degli Spiriti (1965)
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Il Bidone (1955)
Watching his movies with such an intensity might have affected my mood recently. First of all, after being immersed in his amazing surreal settings, my own life felt quite mediocre: no exciting parties with the aristocracy, no orgies with fantastic characters, no bohemian artists or gorgeous celebrities. And above all, no Marcello! Secondly, especially 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita have a melancholic undertone that raises the question of the meaning of life and offers fertile ground for wondering about the quest of love and existence in general. Something has also happened to me in the past few years, as I now understood the lost character of Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita much better than when I last saw the film.
The films were great, all of them, and Italy in the 1960s seemed wonderful. With the exception of Il Bidone, the fusion of dream and reality (which is also very dream-like) was the typical character of the films. Together with the great music by Nino Rota, I could have continued watching the beautiful moving images for hours.
Watching Marcello Mastroianni, I felt desperate about the Finnish guys and started thinking seriously about moving abroad again (obviously not only because of the guys, but because I feel more and more like an outsider in this society, and this can be an especially strong feeling in one's own home country). I miss those passionate-vibrant guys of Southern Europe, they seem to be more alive and more vulnerable to the beauty/exceptionality of women. After 1,5 years in Finland, I'd now be happy if someone called me in the street: "Mademoiselle, mademoiselle, vous avez de beaux yeux..." Sad.
Then, just before starting to write this, I read in the New Yorker book review about a British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: "Instead of feeling that we should have a better life, he says, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise we are setting ourselves up for bitterness." His point is to avoid mourning for the lives we are unable to live - a source of an endless trauma.
In his book "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life" he writes about love: "There is a world of difference between erotic and romantic daydream and actually getting together with someone; getting together is a lot more work, and is never exactly what one was hoping for. So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction."
His book sounds really interesting, and I don't think his main message is that we should necessarily settle for the life we have. Indeed, the article continues that Phillip believes that we are not forced (by others) to settle for the life we are living, but we choose to do so. In other words, we should take responsibility for our own lives - and for changing it as well if we wish to do so.
It is actually not a wonder that I end up from Fellini to modern psychoanalysis. Fellini undertook Jungian psychoanalysis during his mid-life crisis and probably in his film 8 1/2 we see some traces of his own process (Boston Review offers an interesting analysis of the film and Fellini).
In the next post, I will write about all the wonderful things happening in my life and in Helsinki...
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