Nastasia_Khmelnitski

The Great Beauty - Paolo Sorrentino

As it always happens with Sorrentino films, I am puzzled whether I liked it, even though, I feel it's definitely profound on all levels.

Brilliant acting by Tony Servillo, beautiful narrative of the living city of Rome, the apartments holding prestigious, beauty obsessed but hollow crowds of people, the intriguing and available only for the key holders halls of paintings and sculptures by the renown artists.

The film is about what is unsaid, what is in between the lines, the silence holds strong and is louder than any party, and the conga line dance, people following one another with no deeper meaning.

The exploration is of beauty and while the external one seems to fail, becoming the source of making money out of entitled audience with Botox shots, or the classic paintings and sculptures we are not able to appreciate in the darkness of the cinematography, the inner beauty is lost and the great beauty is nowhere to be found. Until... the main character decides to finally, after 20 years of pause, to write a new book. Seems he is about to discover something that will shine light on his life.

45 Years by Andrew Haigh

I wouldn't say this film is a must see or really caught my attention but there's something with the story that bothered me.

45 Years is a very slow paced film that revolves around dialogues and internal thought processes the main character, played by Charlotte Rampling, goes through. The silence is portrayed through autumn, cold, lonely landscapes which are majestic, cinematography wise. The lead characters' work is captivating, builds tension, moves you through all that remains unsaid.

The story is about replacement of a lost love with a new one. A person who has quite a similar name, perhaps even looks the same. The replacement though - similar to Aristotle's thought that art imitates life - is also only a replica of what was and what is lost. The whole narrative and probably the realization of the main character is that all those years she served as a replacement without knowing it, believing the relationship was real (and it was real for her up until this moment). Person she shared most of her life with and made the decisions together with kept life defining secrets.