Review of ‘The Great Beauty’

‘The Great Beauty’ opens with one of the best filmed parties in history – a supine celebration of Berlusconian vulgarity, a parade of monsters that must be seen to be believed – precisely to inform us that the party is over. It is not difficult to detect in the master of ceremonies of such a lavish party, Jep Gambardella (memorable Toni Servillo in his fourth collaboration with Sorrentino), the shadow of Marcello Rubini from ‘La Dolce Vita’, as if Fellini’s portrait of decadence had not changed one iota in more than half a century. But it would be doing a disservice to a film so generous with its audience to consider it a simple tribute.

In ‘The Great Beauty’ the ghosts of ‘Giulietta of the Spirits’ (1965) are projected and the spectral Eternal City of ‘Roma’ (1972) breathes, but Gambardella’s wandering in circles detaches from his Fellinian heritage when he calms his grotesque moods and abandons himself to melancholy. Sorrentino’s cinema is as close to the ridiculous (‘A place to stay’) as it is to the majestic, as is the case. And if his tendency to excess and the episodic make him seem epidermal, it’s because everything, from a ridiculous performer to a mummified nun, interests him. Simply, she knows how to put the world at our feet.

For the most lucid hangovers

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DATA SHEET

Address: Paolo Sorrentino Distribution: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Carlo Buccirosso, Iaia Forte Original title: the great beauty Country: Italy Year: 2013 Release date: 05-12-2013 Gender: Comedy, Drama Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello
Duration: 142min

Synopsis: Rome, a summer in all its splendor. Tourists flock to Janiculum Hill – one Japanese visitor swoons at the sight of such beauty. Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) is an irresistible attractive and seductive man, who makes you ignore the first signs of aging on him. Jep enjoys the social life of the city to the fullest. He attends chic dinners and parties, where his wit and delightful company are always welcome. A successful journalist and innate seducer, he wrote a youth novel with which he won a literary prize and his reputation as a frustrated writer. He hides his disappointment behind a cynical attitude that leads him to see the world with a certain bitter lucidity. On the terrace of his apartment in Rome, with views of the Colosseum, he organizes parties where “the human apparatus” – the title of his famous novel – is shown in all its nudity while the great “comedy of nothing” unfolds. Tired of his lifestyle, Jep dreams of writing again, clinging to the memories of a young love in which he remains anchored. Will he get it? Will he be able to survive this deep revulsion he feels towards himself and towards others, in a city whose beauty sometimes leads to paralysis?