The Great Beauty

Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty” (2013) is an episodic and astonishingly gorgeous elegy, a lament for lost opportunities: unless Truth is Beauty and Beauty Truth, a questionable proposition at best, the movie shows us that the pursuit of beauty may be destructive to truth and authenticity. Although the film is wholly successful on its own terms, the picture is designed as a rejoinder to, and commentary on, several of Fellini’s greatest pictures, particularly, I think, “I Vitelloni,” “La Dolce Vita,” and “8 1/2” -- and the spooky, psychedelically bright colors and grotesquerie derive from “Juliet of Spirits.” Sorrentino likes to announce new sequences with punches in the eye: a close-up of howitzer firing or a woman’s mouth open wide as she screams at the camera or a beautiful naked girl haloed by iridescent neon. Often, these shots seem unmotivated and we discover their meaning only a minute or two later when the narrative reaches the image that has earlier served as a kind of epigraph for the episode, a sort of self-quotation signifying the tone or meaning of this specific sequence. Important events occur off-screen and the deaths of several characters who seem important to the story, if that’s what it can be called, are made the subject of mere allusion -- at times, the movie is maddeningly elliptical, self-absorbed, it seems, in a revery on a kind ofsinister beauty that is both seductive and lethal. (Sorrentino gets an amazing range of emotions on screen and he pulls out all the stops -- in some scenes, his Roman party-goers look like beautiful zombies or vampires.) The film’s protagonist, Jep Gambardella, is introduced dancing gracefully at a wild party thrown for him on his 65th birthday. Gambardella is a journalist who writes for a periodical something like Warhol’s old “Interview” -- a terminally hip and chic publication that is edited by a frazzled female dwarf. Gambardella is like Truman Capote in some ways -- he once wrote a beautiful novel (he deprecates the book as a “novelette”) called “The Human Apparatus” and was famous by the time he was thirty for being a great writer. He never wrote another book and, as the film opens, is a celebrity, a droll, dapper bachelor who knows everyone, who is invited to all the best parties and the most outrageous avant garde events, and who is now famous chiefly for being famous. Jep’s failure to live up to his youthful potential, his inability to write a second novel, is one of the enigmas the film explores. Like Fellini, Sorrentino is a moralist, a severe critic of the depravity of Roma’s “la dolce vita’ and, yet, also an avid consumer of the erotic decadence and ossified piety that seems to characterize the city. Fellini and Sorrentino both delight in staging orgies, lavish and sybaritic banquets, strange religious interludes -- the depravity that they portray is so startlingly picturesque and appealing that the moral tenor of the film is lost in the spectacle. In a way, Sorrentino is less hypocritical than Fellini -- the seductive appeal of the sex and high-fashion, the endless parties, the bizarre salons and pseudo-mystical hermitages of the very wealthy and the very beautiful, all of these distractions which are shown with the utmost glamor, are, in fact, surrogates for the “great beauty” that Jep has been seeking and that he has failed to create despite (or because) he lives in the very center of Rome, perhaps, the grandest and most inspiring city in the world. Fellini showed us beautiful naked women and, then, punished us for desiring those women; Sorrentino is more honest: the theme of his film is distraction -- Jep has never amounted to much of anything, at least, as a writer, because he has been too busy exploring the decadent pleasures of Rome: the fantastic and surreal beauty of the leonine society women in their alabaster mausoleum-like lairs and the city’s marble corridors and churches like baroque theaters and spurting, monumental fountains, these blandishments are metaphors expressing the very temptations that seem to have sapped Jep of his artistic ambition. His apartment overlooks the Coliseum and he sleeps during the day, partying all night or simply wandering the streets as the camera prowls alongside or behind him -- the film is largely constructed from wonderful gliding tracking movements, the steadi-cam traversing the nocturnal plazas and the immense arcades lit so as to reveal some wonderful work of art glowing like honey in the niche of a distant window. (The photography is very deliberate, expressive, showy -- it is like the camera-work in Kubrick’s late films, particularly “Eyes Wide Shut.”) As in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”, Jep has a doomed girlfriend and there is a suicide; periodically, young girls appear, images of innocence, and there are sea-monsters and helicopters flying over Rome and nostalgic flashbacks featuring a vividly blue sea and islands and a little lighthouse atop some tumbled rocks the color of amber. As in “La Dolce Vita,” the divine appears, or, at least, threatens to appear -- in “The Great Beauty” there is a hideous, mummified crone of a saint who seems to suggest the horrors of a life of discipline and rigor, the very kind of life that the film invites us to condemn Jep for rejecting: at the end of the film, we see two sets of stairs ascending in the darkness: one is the Scala Sancta that the old Saint climbs on her knees, creeping upward like a beetle or a snail; the other are some steps where Jep recalls that he met a girl that he loved, forty years earlier, the lighthouse overhead sweeping its gleaming lantern-light across the stony landscape. Who is to say whether the secular or sacred ascending steps are better or, even, if they are fundamentally different -- it takes enormous discipline, I suppose, to lead the life of a dilettante in every respect, to be the perfect gentleman, to attend faithfully every party and to aspire to be completely shallow, while, at the same time, retaining the ironic intelligence and detached wit of the pure observer -- it is, I think, another kind of monasticism possibly no less severe than the holiness that seems to have wilted and burned the old woman, alleged to be 104 and either holy beyond words or a complete idiot, both possibilities suggested by the movie but not resolved. Early in the film, someone mentions Proust and the picture has a distinctly Proustian-sensibility -- it is about super-annuated princes and princes in their marble palaces, strange forms of sexual perversion, expensive courtesans, the cruel rigors of fashion, the decay of the body and horrors of growing old and the mystical power of memory -- all of these subjects wrapped in a cool, abstract mantle of elegiac beauty. Ultimately, “The Great Beauty” closes the loop on “I Vitelloni” -- in Fellini’s first great film, the young man who wants to be a writer must leave the provincial city on the seacoast for Rome; in “The Great Beauty,” Jep’s old friend connives and bullies his cronies into allowing him to perform a theater-piece -- it’s about memories of his youth before he came to Rome. The theater piece is apparently successful, but, success is, of course, inherently disappointing. The old man tells Jep that he is going to leave Rome and return to the country: he explains that he has lived in Rome for 35 years, but the city has disappointed him. It is like the revelation in “Swann’s Way” that the hero has spent his whole life in the pursuit of a woman who didn’t really interest him and who wasn’t his type. The film is long, about 2 1/2 hours, and feels epic and, like 8 1/2 and “La Dolce Vita”, if you’re not in the right mood it just seems to go on and on, piling up examples of decadence and moral failure -- but this is a great film and I’m ashamed that I don’t know anything about either the great actor who plays Jep, an appealing slender man with a knobby face, something like Fred Astaire (Toni Servillo), or the director, Paolo Sorrentino. I look forward to seeing his other films -- on the evidence of this extraordinary film, he seems to me to be a great film artist.