The Great Beauty [DVD] [2013]

The Great Beauty in English, or the more mellifluous La Grande Bellezza in Italian, a sonorous language loved by lovers and troubadours. What greatness do we encounter in this modern Italian classic, an Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Picture in 2013 whom many critics compare to “La Dolce Vita” and “La Notte”? We encounter Rome and its crumbling or crumbled beauty. We see its greatness here, grand faded visions of a glory that made it what it was.Jep Gambardella is 65 now and looks it, or looks even older. He’s tattered around the edges, worn down by life, particularly the high life of Rome. What is that high life? It’s hedonism, narcissism, debauchery. It’s all-night rave parties on the rooftops of swank hotels. It’s play with feminine flesh in bordellos. It’s cynical chat with the literati about the pointlessness of modern civilization, the corruption of politics and the emptiness of culture. It’s life lived for the thrills of pleasure in the absence of love and compassion, an absence shared by a modern church, a Roman Catholicism obsessed with itself in the form of rituals and saints and little else. In this void, this emptiness, this vacuum, Jep exists. He endures somehow.This has been his life for the past 40 years. He came to the great city as a callow young man in his mid-20s. He was bright, well educated, ambitious. He carved out a niche for himself as a journalist and novelist, though he only published one well-received novel long ago. Why didn’t he continue to write fiction? Because, he said, he put everything he had into that one book. It was his testament. It said all he had to say. Others disagree, those who adored the book and adore him still for writing it. They urge him to continue but he doesn’t because he’s spent.His face looks wise but weary, battle scarred with deep lines in it. He used to smile but doesn’t much anymore because his face works against it. It’s set in its ways now, a disapproving face he carries critically through Rome.He was a great journalist too, not just a great writer of fiction. He has the kind of mind that’s bold and incisive enough to ask the right questions, to get at certain truths, the sort that make people uncomfortable because they don’t want to think about them. That’s the problem with good journalism. It gives the world mainly what it seldom wants — hard truths. Fiction, myths, fantasies and delusions are easier to live by. What you believe makes it real even if it isn’t, even if it’s a lie you accept as true. The last thing you want is good journalism. The debauchery of the high life or any other substitute is better.So Jep is adored and feted, but also avoided and detested. He is too good at what he does and makes people squirm. They want to keep their secrets and, like any good interrogator, he’s out to steal them. But he seldom does the journalism anymore, despite the encouragement of his editor. The odd freelance piece then, maybe, but not much more. Instead, his life seems spent.The film goes on in this desultory fashion for the first half. It seems to be going nowhere if nowhere is in circles. Party after party. Rave after rave. Drunkenness. Cocaine snorting. Fornication. Not done by Jep per se, but by many around him at these soirees. It all looks so empty, so pointless.But, as with all good stories, something happens. A shift in tone, a change of emphasis. In this case a death. Halfway through these proceedings that death jars Jep awake. The deep lines in his face now become tiny rivulets of tears.Who has died? Her name was Elisa. Jep met her on a bright shore of the Mediterranean when he was just a lad of 18. She was young too. He adored love, or the notion of it, but didn’t have it. Not until he met Elisa. She was the first, the greatest, the deepest. She was the love he yearned for.Why didn’t he marry her? That question is not quite answered in the narrative. Somehow there were complications, it seems. Somehow the job didn’t get done. Elisa married someone else instead, not Jep but a man named Alfredo Marti.Now, all these years later Alfredo is broken up by the death. He adored Elisa too and comes to Jep with his pain. But the pain, it transpires, is not just Alfredo’s. It’s Jep’s as well. Both men loved her, each in his own way. Jep was passionate, a genuine romantic. Alfredo was devout, forever constant. Elisa chose this constancy but never stopped loving Jep despite it. She carried the flame of that love throughout her life. Alfredo knows it too because he found her diaries after she died. They were locked in a chest and Alfredo broke the lock. Even so, having read their contents, he doesn’t hate Jep for that love. If anything, he appreciates him, glad that through circumstances Jep allowed him to keep her. He didn’t interfere by pursuing her after she left him. That was Jep’s error and weakness. We know this now because he never stopped loving her either.So the second half of the film is softened by fond and loving remembrance. There are some flashbacks to his youth, and Elisa is the beauty he remembers because we see her too along the beach, her skin tanned by the summer sun, her long auburn hair radiant with sunlight. Bella madonna in the flesh. Jep was smitten and right to love her.With this softening the beauty of Rome wakes up. It too comes into the light. Jep sees it with fresh eyes and wonders how he didn’t before. He lived in it, was swallowed up by it, never seeing it like this. The play of light on water. The look of buildings and the spray of fountains. The art on gallery walls everywhere, an art now inviting and embracing, no longer pretentious and ostentatious to the cynical mind.The funeral is bleak. Both broken men are there. Each now will mourn in his own way. Alfredo will continue his lamenting, but a different way will unfold for Jep. The past is dead and can never be retrieved. But it still exists in memory to be savoured if one wants it that way. Jep now wants it that way. He will draw strength and goodness from it. He will look at life differently. He will open his eyes and discover, as if for the first time, the great beauty that is Rome.

Paolo Sorrentino’s much lauded, multi award winning film about La Dolce Vita, the hedonistic, excessive, stylish – but ultimately exhausted ennui of Roman high-life is itself a feast of beautiful, empty, melancholic ‘so what’ exhaustion.The conundrum at the heart of this, is: how can you make a film about a group of sophisticated, pretentious, self-indulgent excessive artists or, more properly, for the majority, pseudo-artists, without your own art-work being subsumed into the gorgeous soft porn, sated, over-indulged luscious skin and vision-fest you are portraying?I was not completely certain, despite the wit in the script, the gorgeousness of the vistas and especially the stunning, stylish women, which the camera lingers lovingly over, in their often naked voluptuousness, whether what I was watching was art, or merely another excuse to show beautiful women naked, and a parade of ageing powerful men clustered like vampires in a feeding frenzy round succulent female flesh.The central character, through whose eyes we ingest Rome’s beauty, fiddling whilst – not necessarily Rome, but life itself, burns and is destroyed, is Jep Gambardella, a 65 year old journalist, of acerbic, mordant pen. Jep is lionised by his society, he is, as he always wanted to be, a mover and a shaker, and delights in being the sort of man who attends the best and wildest and excessive gatherings, but is not only the man who attends those parties – but the man whose dismissive words can make those parties FAIL. Once, many years ago he wrote a novel which was praised high, now he makes and unmakes reputations.The unseen presence which stalks through the film is the grim reaper; death. Although it is hearing of the death of his first love which brings existential despair up close and personal for Jep, we see through his eyes, as he plunges into the swings and roundabouts of parties, sex, and spectacle that he (and all around) are doing this to stop awareness of the knowledge that we are all on that journey to the grave.The film swings constantly between the overindulgence of spectacle, movement, noise and distraction, and silence, emptiness, spaciousness, some kind of surrendering acceptance, as exemplified by the presence of a 103 year old nun, soon to be canonised. However, the spectacle of the lizard-faced, decrepit nun crawling in suffering penance on hands and knees up a flight of stairs as part of her spiritual, saintly journey, is no particular solace either.The performances, (especially Toni Servillo as Gambardella) are all impeccable, the whole filmic quality of the piece is lush, wonderful, artful, but at the end I was left looking for something which I’m not certain I found – something to value, some quality of heart. In some ways, though the characters in this piece have a sophistication and finesse, and a stylish wit and brio, which makes them at least knowingly witty company, I was left with the same feeling of distaste for humankind which reading Bret Easton Ellis’s The Laws of Attraction gave me. And the point of that comparison, is that this is as partial and incomplete a view of humankind (very little that is kind, in this) as the other side unreal saccharine view of traditional Hollywood. This was a world peopled pretty well by only the stunningly beautiful or the Fellini-esque grotesque. It missed the extraordinary of ordinary itself.As filmic spectacle, it is indeed splendid, but is it more than just a very finely lacquered mind-game to be dissected and debated. And is that enough?