(This is contrasted with Steiner’s party where people discuss poetry and philosophy, yet he is morose and distant. That, it’s okay to be silly at times and utter words that don’t always have gravitas. This need to ‘read books’, ‘play piano’, ‘have a perfect family’, without actually pausing and calibrating inner needs can leave people disoriented and frustrated. One way to look at the film could be that it shows how lofty intellectualism can burn people out. “The destruction of high-minded dreams, the destruction of intellectualism, the destruction of ideals” I hope I will have enough sense left to have the capacity and opportunity to plan and organise it.” For me, that would be a completely natural end. A soul slowly dying out, trapped in a body in which the insides gradually sabotage me I think that would be terrible.” Suicide, he said, would be the only option in such a case. “The thing I consider appalling would be to suddenly become a vegetable and a burden on other pe ople. That I will never meet Ingrid again feels devastating.”

Bergman called it “the grimmest thing that happened in my life. But seven years earlier, a report in The Guardian stated that the death of his wife from stomach cancer had left the great filmmaker depressed and made him contemplate suicide. I ngmar Bergman died the best possible way, in 2007: peacefully, in his sleep.

Fittingly, ‘La Dolce Vita’ also gave us the word “paparazzi” in the intrusive, invasive sense we recognise it today. How prescient this film seems from today, from this world around us where sensationalism is everything.

Federico fellini la dolce vita