The Great Beauty (2013)

I can't say I dislike this film. It has some seriously wonderful scenes, some truly exquisitely photographed and performed scenes, scenes that truly transcend into something quite beautiful. But this is only 20% of the film, or so. The rest is meandering and while I'm usually all in favor for films like this, ambiguous to a fault, I usually feel something, some spark of emotion that's on the screen. With this, nothing. As it is, I can't say it's totally a good film, but I also can't quite dismiss it. Maybe it's something that needs a rewatch, but I don't see myself having the excitement to actually rewatch it, not even for the amazing cinematography.

Fmovies: Greetings again from the darkness. This is Italy's submission to the Academy for Best Foreign Film of 2013. If it wasn't such a beautiful film to watch, a fun game of spot the Italian director influence could be played. Director Paolo Sorrentino owes much to Fellini and La dolce vita, but this is more than a tribute. Sorrentino shows much style and insight, and his commitment to camera angles, movement, colors, textures and faces are quite something to behold.

Toni Servillo plays Jep Gambardella, a man celebrating his 65th birthday by doing what he does most every night ... partying with his group of intellectual friends. Jep had a successful novel published in his 20's and has since worked sporadically as a journalist, but has never again focused on his writing. One can't help but notice the similarities to Marcello Mastroianni in La dolce vita, but Jep is jolted with news that sends him flashing back to his younger years and his one true love.

Much of the story includes Roman decadence, and it can easily be viewed as the decline of Roman civilization both past and present. See, Jep's apartment overlooks the famous ruins of The Colosseum. Even moreso, we get a nice conflict between uppity society and the all too important modern and conceptual art crowd. Toss in a few pot shots at the Vatican and Sorrentino seems to be telling us that everyone takes themselves entirely too seriously ... even as we belittle and judge others. Whatever his true message, the sensory overload provided here could be a film class in camera style and is quite fun to watch.

Russian composer Vladimir Martynov said, "A man touches the truth twice. The first time is the first cry from a new born baby's lips and the last is the death rattle. Everything between is untruth to a greater or lesser extent." Many Hindu and Buddhist teachings also refer to the world as being Maya or illusion. According to French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, "Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It's a novel, just a fictitious narrative." In Paolo Sorrentino's stunning The Great Beauty, novelist Jep Ganbardella (Toni Servillo), unable to write another book since his successful first novel, The Human Apparatus, agrees, saying "After all... it's just a trick. Yes, it's just a trick." To discover that, however, he has to move past "the chitter-chatter and the noise, silence and sentiment, emotion and fear, the haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty, and then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity, all buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world." Winner of the Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film and Italy's entry for the 2014 Oscars in the same category, The Great Beauty is a character study of the decadent elites of modern Rome and by extension, contemporary society, yet it also moves beyond that to examine eternal themes of death, love, beauty, and the complexity of life and art.

The film begins on a jarring and surreal note and continues in an episodic Fellini-like vein throughout its two and one-half hour runtime - the sweet life revisited. After snapping a picture of the skyline with its beautiful domes and bell towers, a Japanese tourist visiting Janiculum Hill suddenly collapses and dies. We are suddenly shifted to a raucous 65th birthday party for Gambardella on a terrace opposite the Roman Colosseum where seemingly all the socialites, would-be artists, and pseudo-elites have gathered, perhaps the one-percenters of Roman society. One almost expects to see an "Occupy Via Veneto" demonstration in the streets below.

As Jep moves in and out and around the Roman high life, Sorrentino's acerbic put-downs and satire of the rich and famous travel with him. Now a journalist for a Vanity-Fair style culture magazine, he watches a performance artist run headlong into a brick wall, sustaining a deep cut on her head, then later interviews her, doggedly asking her to explain what she meant by "feeling vibrations." He waits his turn for a plastic surgeon at a Botox injection session, takes in a performance of a man throwing knives at a frightened-looking woman, observes a live giraffe at a historic site in rehearsal for a magic show, looks at a photographer's self-portraits that span his entire lifetime, and sees a 12-year-old girl heaving different colored cans of paint at a wall canvas while crying and screaming.

Through all the partying, the hedonism, and the ersatz art shows, there exists a stream of discernible emptiness that runs not only through his own life, but through the lives of those he surrounds himself with. After calling out a woman's pretensions, he softens the blow by telling her, "We're all on the brink of despair. All we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little. Don't you agree?" His relationship with Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli), the daughter of his good friend, the struggling playwright Romano (Carlo Verdone), however, brings a new focus to his life but it is short-lived.

It is only when he

The Great Beauty fmovies. For me, this film goes to the absolute limits of what can be achieved in a film. Each shot, each scene is a thing of great beauty. The plot is secondary. It was a delight to watch. I might admit a bias: I am an Italophile. And this film has all things Italian: style, of course, but more than that it's the attitude that no matter how they look, they're confident in themselves. There were lots of ironic moments in the film as well: almost as if it were the Italians mocking themselves. Film centers around a main character, and Toni Sevillo is perfect. His character is memorable: he stands out like a character in a great novel. All the other actors, almost stock characters are perfect too. The film's got some ideas too: ideas about art, and life, and transcendence, but somehow one doesn't pay much attention to these too, given all this beauty.

This lengthy (142mins) intriguing, complex movie follows the reflections of former novelist, Jem Gambardella (Toni Servillo), as he contemplates his past and current life, a life, it would appear, of lost opportunities both personal and professional.

As a member of the wealthy elite of Roman society, he participates in their empty pastimes; parties fuelled with drink and drugs, bizarre art events and casual sexual encounters with beautiful but soulless women. Gambardella is both participant and observer, watching himself as much as his associates, mysterious animals trapped in the gilded cage that is Rome with all the stunning beauty of its architecture, fountains, sculptures, and paintings.

We are shown a funeral where Gambradella acts out the etiquette he has just been describing to us; a dinner with a cardinal who seems more interested in food than faith; a saintly nun of extreme age mounting a stone staircase on her knees and crawling painfully onwards and upwards towards an image of Christ . . . Everywhere, life presents contradictions, material and spiritual, emotional pretence and genuine feeling, the Eternal City and its mortal inhabitants, . . .

If all this sounds too heavy, everything is carried along by a welter of gorgeous images complemented by music that varies from the ethereal to hefty thumping dance beats. And the actors' performances are never less than utterly convincing.

At one of the parties as the massed participants enter into yet another conga-style dance, Gambardella remarks that 'we have the best trains in Rome because they don't go anywhere.' Everything comes back to where it starts and ends where it began. So in the long final credits sequence we float languidly beneath the bridges of Rome, left to contemplate the setting in which we first encountered the genial but disillusioned Gambardella.

This is an sumptuous, sensuous, fascinating movie which for me at least probably needs more than one viewing to fully appreciate. Don't miss it!

(Viewed at Screen 1, The Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK, 12 September 2013)

The Great Beauty is such an unusual concoction of sights and sounds, it's a wonder it works at all. Watching it is like seeing a walking bicycle and realizing, to your amazement, that one can actually ride it.

The movie follows Jep Gambardella, the king of Rome's night life. Jep came to Rome in his twenties, after having written a very promising novel, but 40 years later he is settled as a journalist for a high-class literary magazine. Jep has friends, who are just as frustrated and unsatisfied with their lives as he is, despite having all their red Ferraris and high-rise condos. Together they keep each other company and form a support group of sorts. The presence of other miserable people convinces them it's OK, the life is still worth living and facade is still worth maintaining.

Jep has invested last four decades into becoming the Rome's chief socialite and now he has the power to make party a success or disaster. But there's something compulsive about his pursuit of entertainment and admiration. Like a functioning alcoholic, Jep doesn't enjoy his life, but has no will to change it either. He reminds me of Michael Fassbender's sex-addict character in Shame. At the time of orgasm, Fassbender's expression was not that of pleasure, but of pain.

Soon after his 65th birthday, Jep notes to himself that he no longer can afford doing things he doesn't want to do. Instead, he looks up his old friends, learns more about his now-dead girlfriend who left him 40 years ago and develops a friendship with 41 year old stripper named Ramona. Ramona doesn't try to appear important or intellectual, she seems to exist entirely in the present moment. (That presence of mind has its own price, as we learn later)

One of the appealing things about Great Beauty is that its characters are not aware of how funny they are. The pinnacle of comical absurdity is a 104 year old Catholic 'saint'. She's not official saint yet, we're told, but everyone calls her Santa (Saint) Maria. She looks like a mummy that just walked out of its glass case in British Museum, communicates with animals and at one point parodies the 'stair crawl' from the Exorcist. And yet, at no point the film is making fun of her. Nobody seems to question their sanity when Santa Maria asks a flock of migrating flamingos to rest on Jep's balcony.

Sometimes I think the Great Beauty is making it intentionally difficult for us to get to the story. The opening scene with Jep's euro-trash birthday party lasts several minutes longer than storytelling rules require. The changes between scenes are often abrupt and even stunning, leaving the viewer to fill the gaps. There's no obvious drama or big emotional payoff, as you'd expect from an American movie. And yet, at its core, it's the same old story about a writer who has lost his inspiration and tries to figure his place in the world. I feel sympathy for him and his journey, just like I would in any other film.