A Grande Beleza

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.

Fifty years ago, Toni Servillo wrote a novel. It was praised, won an award, and he came to Rome and got caught up in the party set. He earns a living as an interviewer. Occasionally he is asked why he never wrote another novel, and he offers various, patently untrue reasons. Now his first love, whom he has not seen in more than forty years, has died. He turns thoughtful. He remains amused by the circus of the party set, but shreds their pretensions with a few well chosen words. He is obviously suffering a spiritual crisis, but when he tries to seek advice from a cardinal who is said to be next in line for the Papacy, the man walks away.

The obvious move to compare this to is Fellini's 8½, but I see its roots in Samuel Pepys' dictum that "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." Servillo is not tired of life, but he is tired of this life, and sees death coming for him. He is perfect in the role.

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino fills the screen with beautifully shot images: the overblown spectacle of the party set trying to amuse themselves, and the quiet beauty of the old Rome, its bridges, the shores, the Colisseum across the street from Servillo's apartment, the remembered image of his first love. It's a rich, beautiful, thoughtful, wistful movie.

This film is a modern masterpiece of Cinema. Luca Bigazzi's cinematography is beautiful, with elegant tracking shots of Rome that draw the viewer into the loveliness of Jep's world (even if age and experience seems to have robbed him of the ability to feel and see this great beauty himself).

The enchanting score of choral works by David Lang (I Lie), Vladimir Martynov (The Beatitudes), John Tavener (The Lamb) and Arvo Part (My Heart is in the Highlands) give depth to the wonderful images of Rome. This haunting soundtrack replaces the need for dialogue and adds intensity to Servillo's melancholic performance.

Servillo's acting is superb from his moments of dry humour to the heartbreaking intensity of those feelings he cannot quite hold on to.

La Grande Bellezza gives a window into Roman life that is probably only fully understood by a fellow Roman. However all can appreciate the aesthetic pleasure of Sorrentino's Rome and the bittersweet meanderings of its characters.

This is a cinema of the highest order, imbued with elegance & style. For the viewer it is like swimming in honey. Grazie Signore Sorrentino.

Italian cinema is, at last, on a roll again. Perhaps not in the same way as when Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini and De Sica were batting masterpiece after masterpiece into the arena but maybe more prodigiously than at any time since the young Olmi and young Bertolucci were setting the screen alight. In recent years we have had Michelangelo Frammartino's "Le Quattro Volte", Gianni De Gregorio's sublimely gentle comedies "Mid-August Lunch" and "The Salt of Life" and, perhaps best of all, the films of Paolo Sorrentino whose "The Consequences of Love", "The Family Friend" and "Il Divo" were highly original and sufficiently off-the-wall to invite comparisons with Fellini. His one venture into English-language cinema, "This Must be the Place", met with a largely hostile reception from critics who accused him of being self-indulgent but I found the film to be gorgeous and quirky and just what I would have expected from so idiosyncratic a talent. And now we have "The Great Beauty", a return to Italy and a return to, what his critics might see as, earlier form.

This film, too, has been compared to Fellini which is entirely appropriate as this is a "La Dolce Vita" for the 21st century. You can even imagine the film's central character, Jeb, as Marcello, older if hardly wiser and for Sorrentino nothing much has changed. But if this is Sorrentino in Fellini mode it's just as close to the beauty and spectacle of "Amarcord" or, more appropriately, "Juliet of the Spirits". Once again the lead is taken by Toni Servillo, who was Sorrentino's Andreotti in "Il Divo" and once again he confirms his position as one of the cinema's finest actors, heading a truly superb ensemble cast.

As in "La Dolce Vita" there is no real 'story' but rather a series of episodes in the life of Jeb in the days following his 65th birthday, (his birthday party is the first of the film's many great sequences). If there is a theme it's Jeb's increasing disillusionment with the lifestyle he has associated himself with over the years, a lifestyle he is very reluctant to give up, no matter how pragmatically he views it. He is a man who has had many women but no real relationship to speak of, (the early love of his life married someone else). He meets the daughter of an old friend, a 42 year old stripper with a drug habit, and they strike up a relationship of sorts though when they go to bed together he is happy when they don't have sex. He gets sustenance from his friends although he can be cutting and abrasive in their presence. It seems as it is they, and not money or power, which keeps him going.

This is a magnificent movie, the kind of film that you know is being composed, frame by gorgeous frame, by a master film-maker. It is a breathtaking melange of sound and images, of great performances and superlative dialogue that draws you in and holds you from its first shot to its last. Some directors open their films with great tracking shots but Sorrentino saves his to the end, up, over and under the bridges of the Tiber as the final credits roll. Don't leave the cinema to the very last second.

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 hears of the death of Eliza, a girl he loved as a teenager, that he receives a wake-up call. Reliving his missed opportunity in flashbacks, he learns through her diary that she loved him all along and begins to reexamine the direction of his life. After a less than enlightening meeting with an aging cardinal (Roberto Herlitzka) who wants to talk only about his favorite recipes, he throws a dinner party for a 104-year-old woman rumored to be destined for sainthood who has spent her life working with the poor in Africa and who subsists on 40 grams of plant roots. Seeing life in all of its simplicity and wonder, she movingly points him in the direction of the authentic "great beauty" that he seeks.

Servillo is magnificent as the blocked writer seeking renewal and his presence makes every scene come alive with spontaneity. Adding to this is the gorgeous soundtrack featuring The Beatitudes of Martynov, choral works by David Lang, John Taverner, and Arvo Part, and the contemporary Yolanda Be Cool's We No Speak Americano. Though The Great Beauty is not a film about Rome per se, the cinematography of Luca Bigazza memorably captures the striking sights and sounds of The Eternal City, the ancient monuments juxtaposed with the modern buildings. Literally bursting with the pulse of flawed humanity, The Great Beauty is a feast for the eyes, the ears, and the soul.