When In Rome Season: The Great Beauty (DIr Paolo Sorrentino, 2h 22m, 2013)

Rome will never end, but this season, like all seasons before it, must. Perhaps we will return to Rome again some day, or journey through another city via cinema. We have one final stop on our journey. Not the Rome of the Fascist era, fervent and chaotic, nor of the post-war era, battered and brutalised, nor the Rome of the sixties, the chaotic epicentre of fame, rotten to the core, or even the Seventies, where the city's politics poured out into the streets. Today, we come to the Rome of the present, through one of Italian cinema's recent highlights, Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, a spectacular homage to the city in the twenty-first century, through the eyes of novelist, critic and social butterfly, Jep (Toni Servillo), as his lavish lifestyle and social circle begin to disintegrate around him

Between 1972, and the release of the Great Beauty in 2013-Italian cinema had experienced an unexpected downturn in fortunes-its chief comedic genre was little more than softcore sex comedies who seemed principally interested in emptying the pockets and occasionally pushing the sense of decency, whilst other genres struggled to leave the country, leading to the nadir of the country's entire cinema in the disastrous 1985 figures of barely eighty films being made or released in the year, and with audiences dwindling, it took much of the rest of the 1980s, and the first half of the 1990s to recover, with Italian film production by the mid 2000s returning, despite the burgeoning presence of American films in the Italian market, to nearly 300 films a year, and a much larger chunk of the market than Italian films had enjoyed for nearly 30 years.

At the forefront of this resurgence, alongside the lauded Matteo Garrone and Gabriele Salvatores, director of Oscar-winning Mediterraneo (1991), came Paolo Sorrentino. His first major film, Il Duce shone a light into the corners of 1990s Italy, and the slowly collapsing career of Italian politician Giulio Andreotti. It promptly won the Grand Jury at Cannes. His next. This Must be the Place would see his first film in English twin Sean Penn's ageing rockstar confront the horrors of the holocaust and a brutal revenge on his father's captors. The Great Beauty, thus, comes at a perfect point in the director's career, a crystallisation of his style, at a point where Italian cinema roared back into rude life.

In broad brushstrokes we are introduced to Jep, in the midst of his bacchanalian 65th birthday party, in his flat overlooking the Colosseum-it is a scene of excess, but where Fellini places the rot of Rome at the centre of La Dolce Vita, it is the profundity of life, of virility, that practically bursts from the screen, as Jep steps out from dancing rows, shot in slow-motiion, to light up, a figure at once commanding and utterly assured. This assurance, in a sequence that's already introduced his circle of friends, from Romano (Carlo Verdone), and Lello (Carlo Buccirosso), to occasional flame, Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli) to his editor, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola), is about to crumble. Jep, outside of being the self-styled King of Rome's parties, is a one-time author-having never quite defeated his decades long writer's block and creative millase-and occasional critic, first seen in action watching a performance artist run head-first into a Roman Aqueduct, only to talk about her "method" in third person, to the later amusement of Dadina.

However, the comfortable life of the occasional writer, social butterfly, and flanneur-several sequences simply shows Jep wandering through the streets of Rome, in evocative and beautifully composed shots-is about to end. Awaiting Jep one morning is the widower of his first, true love, Elisa, who is utterly inconsolable at the fact that his wife has kept a diary for the last 35 years, treating her current husband as merely a faithful companion. This jolt proceeds to launch Jep on a journey of self-reflection that will soon tear his friend-group apart as much as it disintegrates around him, meeting figures as disparate as a stripper and a cardinal who is the forerunner to be the next Pope, as Jep struggles both with spiritual and earthly dilemmas, including his dwindling friend-group and his long-gestating second novel that takes on new significance when meeting the figure of a aged, and utterly holy nun.

The Great Beauty, as much as it is a film about Rome, about this great and powerful city, about its rich and powerful, its beauty, and occasional absurdity, is a film about regret, about ageing Jep and his entourage, his friends, are living on borrowed time, and it is the death of his lover, only ever seen in flashback in their youth, that spurs him on. It is time, and age, and death that slowly destroys Jep's inner circle, as they either realise they have become too old, or fragile, or poor, for the never-ending hedonism of the city, or tragedy rears its head and claims them in one form or another, from death, disillusionment or other means, till only Jep and Dadina are left. That at least part of this comes from Jep's hand itself-his demolition of Stefania in one of the film's stand out sequences is as visceral as it is uncomfortable, a skewering of the Roman middle classes, and their vacuousness.

 

But Jep is more than simply a tragic figure, a man adrift and increasingly alone as his friend-group and decadence fall apart around him-Jep is far more than just the excess and the aimless drifting of a man unable-or unwilling to write. Far more than Marcello, far more than any of the previous protagonists of the films we have talked about, Gep is a man of Rome-we see him traverse it, at all times of day, from the familiar streets and canals and aqueducts, to the staggering views from his flat, to the backstreets of Rome, appearing in a strip club in one moment, and the gardens of a Cardinal in the next. Moreover, through him, the film steps into the exclusive and the exquisite, a sequence seeing him and an acquaintance let into the palaces and private grounds of some of Rome's most beautiful locations, his reverence, and clear adoration of the beauty of these places palpable.

For The Great Beauty is a film of beauty. There are too many beautifully composed shots to count, with cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi, imbuing so many of the film's moments with the deftness of a Renaissance painter-particularly in his encounters towards the end of the film, with both the saint and the stark carcass of the Costa Concordia, the framing, the visual influence of Caravaggio, hangs heavy like incense. But more than this, Bigazzi's camera, his framing, Sorrentino's direction, and the commanding figure of Servillo, who commands the frame, make Rome beautiful. Even at these moments of excess, even at the film's most outlandish moments, including two beautiful, and otherworldly encounters with wildlife in the city, there is beauty, and whilst the film's finale does settle onto a single Great Beauty that changes Jep's life, it is just as easy, and just as pertinent to consider the city as the Great Beauty itself.

It is easy to reduce the Great Beauty to a modernisation, a retreading of the themes of La Dolce Vita, a retelling, for the Berlusconi age, of the same old corruption, the same old rot at the centre of the Eternal City, the indulgences, the excess, too much of a temptation for the once creative Gep, as he gives in to womanising, wilder and wilder distraction, and follows Marcello down the path to ruin. It is equally easy to compare it to Roma, an attempt to resolve the Rome of childhood with this altogether more complex-and undeniably richer-beast.; that it has become in adulthood. One could even see it as homage, on holy and secular levels, to a city that will never die, to an era of Rome's rich and chaotic history.

But it is so much more than this-it is the return of Italian cinema, as it always returns, back to its place as unique and unmistakable figure in world cinema, in a remarkable pilgrimage back to one of its greatest subjects. The Great Beauty is nothing short of a cinematic triumphal parade, a spectacular, soul-searching, and ultimately loving portrait of one of cinema's greatest cities.

Rating: Must See: Personal Recommendation

Next week, and indeed next month we head back to the 1980s, with another quartet of films from that beloved decade of cinema, beginning with cult vampire flick, The Lost Boys.

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