The Great Beauty 2013

 

This large lavish and wonderful Italian film directed by Paolo Sorrentino opens with shots of a tourist’s Rome. We soon see a bunch of Japanese visitors to the city taking in the sights and taking photos, one raises his camera to catch a view to take home with him, and boom drops dead.  A fast cut and we are dropped into a big 65^th birthday party for the film’s lead superbly played by Toni Servillo . Its a sprawling vibrant sequence rich with conga lines (called La Colita here), beautiful women and handsome men along with quite a few grotesques all shaking it to the loud music. The birthday “boy” is Jep Gambardella  a high life habitant of Rome’s “Dolce Vita” who likes to be referred to as “the king of the high life”.

At first one can’t help but think of and be reminded of that other “Dolce Vita” film made by Fellini more than 50 years earlier. That’s ok. Great art always influences, and film is no exception to the rule. Jep lives in a beautiful apartment with a terrace overlooking the Coliseum and is an author who years back wrote a well-regarded novel, and is now living on his laurels, and his laurels are living off of him. One of the recurring questions that Jep gets asked throughout the film, is why hasn’t he written another novel and his answers are generally as vapid as the question such as “I was lazy” or his profound and mysterious response  “I was looking for the great beauty but didn’t find it”. 

 

Jep is now a journalist and critic who every so often meets with his editor, a wise and smart female dwarf who serves him homemade lunches in her office and offers up truths about life. She is one of many startling and engrossing characters who pass through Jep’s life, not counting his ghosts who come and go, along with a giraffe who appears then disappears, “its just a trick” the bearer of this majestic animal says. And it is. Maybe his life and indeed this film is just a trick. 

Where Fellini’s Via Venito was made up and built in a studio along with much of his Rome, Sorrentino fills his canvas with the real city, at dawn, in the afternoons and of course the bursting evenings. And like the Fellini film this one is also episodic and romantic. There are scenes that poke fun and some malice at the Roman art world, a performance artist who literally bangs her head into a concrete wall, and an unhappy but pampered young girl who throws buckets of paint onto a canvas and is hailed as a great artist, I’ve  seen stuff like this in real life and in real time, think Marina Abramovic.
The catholic church also comes in for a beating with a Cardinal who cares more about saving recipes than saving souls and a saint, Sister Maria who is as old as the world and with a flock of flamingos brings this marvelous adventure to an end. Jep is still alone in his eternal city, and is still searching for the great beauty that might be nowhere or everywhere. The best film of 2013.