It is easy to arouse passion and produce pain, not too difficult to evoke laughters, provoke anger, inspire love, or jerk tears. But grief seems such a strong and personal emotion that is almost impossible to induce with special effects, clever script, or artifical intelligence.

In Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, we read about Schmuh’s Onion Cellar — a private club which serves neither alcohol nor music, but a chopping board, a paring knife, and an onions. At Mr Schmuh’s signal, the customers would start chopping the onion to smaller and smaller pieces, and the juice would make them weep, howl, and mourn for all that had been lost forever.

Some believe that the magnitude of upheavals in our era had overwhelmed us, that we blink at disasters and live in a tearless century. Realism, then, is perhaps not as powerful an expression as eels inside a horse’s head, grandma’s layers of skirt, or the fervent drumming of a midget.

La Dolce Vita! Like life itself, this masterpiece of Fellini starts and drags on frivolously, then becomes bearable as we learn its ways, then enchants us as its richness of details builds up, then makes us sad when it ends. When it ends, we are full of fond memories about Marcello’s glamorous yet wretched life, and our mind dwells upon details to which we did not pay attentions enough. We want to replay The Sweet Life, and live again in those empty and decadent evenings and dawns.

What add sweetness to life: Was it the Jesus Christ statue carried by helicopter, large breasts of a woman, echo chamber in a decaying palace, the sight of a sea monster after a night of orgy, or a familiar girl waving to you on the beach at dawn?