(Italy/France, 142 min.)
Dir. Paolo Sorrentino, Writ. Paolo Sorrentino, Umberto
Contarello.
Starring: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Carlo
Buccirosso,
 |
| Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. Photo credit Gianni Fiorito, Courtesy of Mongrel Media. |
Bellissimo! If
Federico Fellini were to come back from the dead today and film a roaring
party, it might look a lot like The Great
Beauty. The Great Beauty could be
the best Fellini film that Fellini never made. The legacy of the cinema Italiano is alive in full force
in this sumptuous satire from director Paolo Sorrentino (Il divo). The Great Beauty,
Italy’s official submission and nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at this
year’s Academy Awards, is an intoxicatingly Fellini-esque portrait of the ruins
of Rome seen through the eyes of an aging writer named Jep Gambardella (played
by an outstanding Toni Servillo). Jep, a fun-loving celebrity/culture
journalist, gazes upon Rome with increasingly world-weary eyes. What Jep sees looks
fun and glamorous at first before Sorrentino perverts the old man’s worldview
to make everything seem hollow by the film’s end. Sorrentino delivers with The Great Beauty an entrancing satire on
the empty excess of the sweet life.
A film could not open with a wilder start than The Great Beauty does, for Sorrentino introduces the audience to Rome in all its eye-catching wonder. A striking tour guide leads a group of visitors around the picturesque ruins. It’s a view so remarkable and beautiful that it kills a Japanese tourist.
If Rome seems nice by day, though, it seems twice as
inviting at night. Cut to an endless train of sexy people get their drink on and
bounce to the beat of “Far l’amore” at a wild party on a rooftop. (If you aren’t into the sexy world The Great Beauty by this point in the
film, might as well leave.) The bash is a roaring affair that Jay Gatsby could
only dream of, yet Sorrentino fills the rooftop with party guests who are not
only young and beautiful, but he also invites guests of all ages, shapes, and
sizes to bust a move on the dance floor.
The elongated party sequence, consistently fuelled by the
film’s outstanding sound design, sees people of all ages and body types bumping
together in a wild fracas of excess. Everyone lives the high life in The Great Beauty (unless they’re members
of the nunnery to which the film frequently cuts), whether they’re wearing the
finest in Italian suits or dancing bare-chested. Each partier looks so chic and
unique they could be the subject of a Vogue
photo spread or perhaps a Diane Arbus shoot. What’s wild about The Great Beauty’s extravagant opening
number, though, is simply the sight of seeing such a range of revellers enjoying
the party. As partiers young and old form a line and dance in unison,
Sorrentino offers a snippet of life that one would be unlikely to see in North
America where nightlife seems a much younger affair. The sweet life of Rome looks
ageless.
It’s in the midst of this sexy party that the film
introduces Jep. It’s actually his 65th birthday, so the fact that
such a suave senior can attract such a crowd is extraordinary. It’s only then,
roughly ten minutes or more into the film, that The Great Beauty assumes any clear perspective. The film comes from
Jep’s point of view as he narrates his musings on life from his posh Roman
apartment, which is almost within reach of the Coliseum and offers a view so
beautiful it could kill another Japanese tourist.
Life is beautiful when one doesn’t look at it too closely,
though, and Jep’s love for wild parties, gorgeous women, and hifalutin culture
just doesn’t seem the same when a face from his past appears and drops a piece
of information that makes him re-examine life with a new hue. Jep enjoys the
status as a one-hit wonder novelist in addition to his fame as a celeb journo,
and his book—a novella, really—called The
Human Apparatus provides much of the subject—and basis—for his newfound
introspection. He’s tired of the superficiality of his life, or he is only now
awakening to it, and he gradually puts the condition of man (the “human
apparatus,” he calls it) under the microscope.
Jep recalls that one of his goals as a young writer was to
one-up Flaubert and write a book about nothing. It’s in this great nothingness
that The Great Beauty finds the magnificence
that lies in the contradictions of Rome as Jep piddles about his newly
trivialized life and takes in each moment with writerly inquisitiveness. Jep
does write about nothing, for he turns Rome’s radiant emptiness into a thing of
beauty through his thoughts and words. He’s just too lazy to put paper to pen.
The newfound clarity leads to romance, as Jep finds love
with a woman who oddly fits with the timeless beauty he observes throughout the
city. Romana (Sabrina Ferilli), an over-the-hill stripper, matches the
deteriorating landmarks that retain their beauty in spite of their age. As Jep
explores this new chapter of his life with Romana, he opens up to new feelings
and finds emotions and desires that have been covered by his superficial life
until the news of lost love arrives shortly after his birthday.
Romana, however, exits the film abruptly in a bizarrely
disjointed departure. Such blemishes too frequently mark the ornate artistry of
The Great Beauty, for the pace and the flow of the film are marked by the
efforts to trim the film down to 142 minutes from its original running time of
a reported 190 minutes. Romana’s departure causes the most significant
narrative gap into which the excellence of The
Great Beauty falls short, but other characters come, go, and rupture the
film in turn.
The Great Beauty
is hardly a film about plot, though, so Jep’s musings on life and art restore
the film as a historian does an old masterpiece. The Great Beauty finds extensive moments in which Sorrentino and
cinematographer Luca Bigazzi draw out the exquisite meaning (or meaninglessness)
of life in beautifully elongated shots that sweep throughout the parties,
ruins, and picturesque settings to explore every surface and space that goes
untouched and unnoticed by Jep’s fellow partiers. Smith offers a profound, yet
understated, view of culture and life. Looking at the ruins of his own life,
marked symbolically by the remains of the ancient city that are peppered
throughout the new season of Rome to make Sorrentino’s city resemble a timeless
crumbling pit of nothingness, Jep mixes disillusionment with biography and
turns each moment into something beautiful. Jep, in the face of so much splendour
and youth, must confront the contradictions of his life and ultimately
challenge the fact that his life has been meaningless.
Jep still finds time to attend great soirées and the unending string of socialites provides The Great Beauty with a series of
inspiring juxtapositions and incongruities. The star performer at an arty party,
for example, is not a seasoned Michelangelo, but a snotty little girl throwing
paint. The socialites watch in awe as she hurls gobs of colour and makes the
kind of thing some guy at the art gallery would dismiss and say, “My kid could
paint that.” The partiers nevertheless look at the coloured mess with awe and
phony-intellectual wonder: how good it is to give something meaning! A son of
Jep’s friend, on other hand, deals with psychosis by painting himself red,
while a Cardinal regales dinner guests with culinary tips. Sorrentino’s Rome is
a beautiful city ravaged with hedonism.
The most startling contrast might be the apparent split of
the film into two unsignalled parts. There is a thematic shift within The Great Beauty that comes somewhere
near the unforgettable cameo appearance by Fanny Ardant. After catching the
French beauty, playing an old flame, on a walk home after a bumpy party, Jep
begins to see all that is absent from his life. The film builds to Jep’s most
amusing party in which he plays host to a visiting nun. The nun, a woman of
Mother Teresa-like age and stature, has taken a vow of poverty that differs
greatly from the cornucopia of self-indulgence that comes in the first two
hours. Sorrentino finds in this hunched little saint the contradictions that
Jep struggles to articulate in musings. The partiers are enrapt by her
presence, for nobody is doing shots or cocaine, and they are enamoured with her
angelic devotion to the spiritual reward of drawing people closer together. The
hypocrisy of these people is palpable as The
Great Beauty looks at this old woman with a funny, yet endearing eye.
The Great Beauty
doesn’t end with a big ugly monster looking back at the audience, for
Sorrentino makes the audience confront the monster within them as they watch
Jep transform during this curious journey. The
Great Beauty instead offers a beautifully serene image as a flock of
flamingoes joins the party to greet the saint. As Jep steps onto his balcony
and watches the birds in the light of the setting Roman sun, The Great Beauty captures life in all
its absurd, natural beauty.
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
The Great Beauty screens in Ottawa at The ByTowne until March 6th.
