The Time of Jep and the Time of Victoria: Love and Pleasure between Boomers and Millennials

The article is an interpretation of two great films of the 2010s in view of intergenerational differences and the related attitudes towards love and hedonism. It draws on the conceptualisation of depressive hedonia by Mark Fisher, a condition typical of late capitalism. It deals with the relation between investment in romantic love and investment in adventurism, which has changed from the boomer to the millennial
generation, and finds that the latter revitalises the idea of romantic love, but it can do that only in relation to the back-up option offered by hedonism. The cities of Rome and Berlin, where the two films are set, are read as two symbolic places that are historically aligned with the ideas of the two films.