The Great Beauty
La grande bellezza
Paolo Sorrentino (2013)
Ryan Gilbey in his New Statesman review describes the setting of Paolo Sorrentino’s latest as ‘the Rome of Fellini and of Berlusconi in equal measure’. I’m not sure about the equal measure. The central character, Jep Gambardella, is an observant, jaded, wryly melancholy journalist and socialite. He naturally evokes Marcello in La dolce vita and La grande bellezza shares with that film an episodic structure. Sorrentino surely means to echo Fellini at several points – for example, when the protagonist and others wander round a grand estate in the early morning. Dancing at a party, Jep says to another guest that ‘our train dances are the best because they never go anywhere’: the amusing aimlessness of a many-peopled dance recalls the finale of 8½; the grotesquerie of some of the dancers is more broadly ‘Fellini-esque’. Because the time is the present the febrile, licentious flavour of these gatherings in La grande bellezza brings to mind the ‘bunga bunga’ parties of the Berlusconi era but Sorrentino is much less concerned with skewering contemporary politics than he was in Il Divo. This new film is an elegy for Jep’s life in Rome, a life that has lasted several decades. The principal cause of his regret is not a degeneration of the political culture of the place but Jep’s sense that he’s wasted time and, now in his mid-sixties, hasn’t much time left. He can still appreciate the allure of the high life he’s enjoyed but it’s ultimately unsatisfying to him. As a much younger man, Jep wrote an admired first novel, ‘The Human Apparatus’: during the film he’s repeatedly asked why he never wrote another and he eventually explains that, in order to do so, he would have needed to find ‘the great beauty’ which continued to elude him. Flashbacks to his youth before he came to Rome appear to locate that beauty in the face and body of a girl whom Jep loved and lost.
When he reviewed the film in Cannes, Peter Bradshaw described it as ‘pure couture cinema’. I imagine this was meant as a compliment but I think it’s this quality that caused me to find La grande bellezza a lowering experience. The title is an accurate description of the look of the movie: a lot of thought and skill has gone into the images created by Sorrentino and his cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi. And the visual beauty is remarkably various: it includes moving pictures that are startling and dynamic, as well as ones that are conventionally lovely and lit with nostalgia. But the satirical targets – the pretentious conversation of the Roman culture vultures, the bizarreries of the Catholic church, the commercialisation of art – are obvious and easily hit; and the character of Jep, although Toni Servillo incarnates him perfectly and plays throughout with a finely controlled aplomb, is very familiar. World-weary but aching for vanished love and innocence, Jep’s otherwise highly sensitive bullshit antennae seem not to be sufficient for him to be aware that he’s a cliché. At the start of the film, the screen is plastered with the thoughts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. There’s so much text that epigraph is hardly the word to describe it (something about travelling and staying in the same place, I think). The high-toned words suggest that Paolo Sorrentino means intellectual business but the ideas below the rich surface of La grande bellezza are moldy. In the end, the film’s nostalgic strength consists in making you long for a golden age of Italian movie-making, and for La dolce vita in particular. Lele Marchitelli has written an elegiac score that’s pleasant but doesn’t do more than remind you of the greatness of Nino Rota’s music for Fellini. Sorrentino also puts on the soundtrack some piercing bits of opera and other classy vocals. Each time you hear them – especially a rendering of ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’ – the film seems to acquire emotional depth. But only seems to do. It’s an illusion familiar from Inspector Morse.
9 September 2013