Trenini
The word trenini means "little train" in Italian and names a popular kind of conga-line dance. In The Great Beauty, someone at a dance-party says: "They have the most beautiful trenini here in Rome. They are beautiful because they go nowhere."
The director of The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino has said: "In Rome, we are drawn to oblivion, to nothingness. Parties are the epitome of this void – they’re beautiful but senseless."
1.
The Great Beauty is an Italian film directed by Paolo Sorrentino and released at Cannes in 2013. The movie was awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in that same year. The picture has been successful internationally and has made a profit at the box office.
In interviews, Sorrentino describes the film as an attempt to document the corruption of the Berlusconi era in Italy. (Part of Berlusconi’s media empire is Medusa Films, one of the production companies responsible for The Great Beauty). Italian corruption, as evidenced by the films of Federico Fellini, is highly photogenic and the line between criticism and celebration is dauntingly narrow, a razor’s edge. The movie is beautiful, lavishly symbolic, and lengthy. In all of these characteristics, the movie invokes Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, a great film about decadence along the Via Venuta in Rome, one of the most influential pictures of the early 1960's. Both pictures follow the experiences of a pleasure-loving Roman man wandering about the Eternal City, often at night. Although exuberant in their display of pleasure and beauty, both films are essentially moral – they probe a hollowness and rot at the center of Roman high society.
The history of film in Italy is rife with examples of estimable movies disliked by Italian critics and Italian audiences. Most of Fellini’s films were panned by Italian critics; as early as Rosselini’s Rome: Open City, Italian movie reviewers specialized in denouncing Italian films as crass, vulgar, and, even, unpatriotically critical. The Great Beauty belongs to this tradition: when first released in Italy, the movie was attacked as derivative and bombastic. A few reviews were mildly favorable, but they were lukewarm at best. In the rest of Europe and the United States, however, The Great Beauty was a sensation, easily recouping its 9 million Euro budget at the box-office and, in fact, earning more than 23 million Euros world-wide. When the film was awarded the Academy Award for Best Picture in Hollywood, Italian critics had to take notice of the movie and grudgingly re-evaluated the picture: perhaps, it wasn’t so bad after all. About a week after the film had won the Academy Award, The Great Beauty was shown on TV, on one of Berlusconi’s networks. The presentation was calamitous: the film was presented with many, many commercial interruptions, expanding its running time from two hours and 22 minutes to almost three hours (over 170 minutes). The movie is episodic and shown with innumerable commercial interruptions the picture became indecipherable and tedious – Sorrentino’s carefully configured transitions and thematic bridges were obscured by the commercials and many viewers found the movie initially intriguing, but, then, confusing: just one damn thing after another. Some thought that Berlusconi’s television network intentionally slashed the film into a cubist "hash" as a reprisal against the social critique embedded in the picture.
Although Sorrentino avoids explicit social and political commentary, the film’s epic denunciation of Italian society struck uncomfortably close, particularly with respect to members of the Roman elite. Italy has one of the slowest growing economies in the world and the country’s fiscal malaise seems reflected in the film’s portrayal of aimlessness and moral chaos. The Great Beauty is a film that goes nowhere – one critic has characterized its only plot as comprised by a series of increasingly complex answers to a single question: "Why hasn’t the protagonist written another book after his initial success with his novelette, The Human Apparatus, forty years earlier?" But the reason The Great Beauty goes nowhere is because Italy is going nowhere; the country is languishing and Sorrentino both explores, and dramatizes, this dilemma in his film.
2.
Paolo Sorrentino
Paolo Sorrentino is 44. He was born in Naples, a place that he describes as naturally "theatrical". Sorrentino first came to international attention after directing the 2004 film The Consequences of Love, a movie that also stars Toni Sevillo, the actor who plays Jep in The Great Beauty. Sorrentino is often lauded for his highly literate screenplays – he has, in fact, written and published two novels.
Sevillo appears in Sorrentino’s next film, Il Divo (2008), a biopic about an Italian politician, Giulio Andreotti. The movie is exorbitant, wildly expressionist, and portrays Italian politics in a profoundly sinister light. (The movie is also very topical and complex, featuring elaborate Machiavellian maneuvers by the strangely vacant and robotic Andreotti – I had no idea who was doing what to whom; there are a lot of lurid murders in the picture but I never figured-out who was being killed or why.) Sean Penn was on the Cannes jury that considered Il Divo when it was shown in the French competition. He approached Sorrentino after a screening of Il Divo and asked the director to make a film using him as an actor. The result was This Must be the Place released in 2011. This Must be the Place was shot mostly in the United States, in fact, in Indiana and also Utah – both places that Sorrentino says that he loved. (He had not been to any parts of the United States other than New York City and San Francisco prior to shooting this movie and his English was only barely serviceable.) Visually lavish, This Must be the Place is similarly operatic with respect to its narrative – the story involves an aging Goth rock star who leaves his hermitage in Ireland for his father’s death bed. His father, a holocaust survivor, entrusts his son with the mission of hunting down and seeking revenge on a German guard who tortured him in a concentration camp in World War Two. As it turns out, the guard’s children live in Indiana and the old man is finally discovered in Utah. The film turned out to be impossible to market – Sean Penn’s middle-aged rock-star looks so strange and has such a peculiar affect that the movie is immediately very alienating. When I first saw trailers for the picture, I thought that the movie was some kind of wacky comedy. (Penn modeled his performance on the appearance and behavior of Robert Smith, the lead singer of The Cure.) But, once the estranging aspects of the movie are accepted, the picture is remarkably interesting, a very penetrating road-movie about the American midwest and west, and the film was certainly one of the most noteworthy pictures of 2011.
Critics immediately pointed out the close resemblances between Fellini’s landmark La Dolce Vita and The Great Beauty. Sorrentino is uncomfortable with those comparisons because he reveres Fellini and regards him as a great master of the cinema – "he is the beacon of cinema," Sorrentino says. In response to comments about the relationship between the two films, Sorrentino simply notes that he is an Italian film maker and the influence of Fellini remains inescapable for directors raised in that tradition.
At present, Sorrentino is working on a film about a composer that is in production in the Alps with Michael Caine, apparently, playing a lead role. The movie is called In the Future.
Sorrentino has said that he had a poor relationship with his own father and that he regards Toni Servillo, who is fifteen years older than him, as a kind of surrogate father. "To this date," Sorrentino says, "all of my films are about the search for a father." The director has made four films with Servillo as his leading man. Toni Servillo is a fellow Neapolitan and, according to Sorrentino, "can do anything as an actor" – before working with Sorrentino, he was primarily famous as stage-actor. This range and flexibility is obvious: Sevillo is nightmarishly menacing as a gangster in Gomorrah (2008), gives an expressionistic performance in Il Divo that seems to cross-breed Nosferatu with Richard Nixon, and is instantly appealing in The Great Beauty, a film that might be insufferable with another kind of leading man. Servillo shares with Sorrentino a quality of "mysterious melancholy" that the director thinks important. Sevillo is a well-known director of Italian opera in his own right.
In an interview, Sorrentino said that he conceived of Jep Gambardalla as a figure as handsome and attractive as Paul Newman. Servillo wears blue contact lenses over his brown eyes. When he says "I’m a gentleman – that’s one thing I am sure of," the audience knows what he means and believes him.
3.
Locations
The Grand Beauty begins at Fontano dell’ Acqua Paolo, the first great fountain built on the Left Bank of the Tiber, the so-called "great fountain" or fontanone – it was built at the terminus of a Roman aqueduct by Pope Paul V between 1610 and 1620.
The fountain is located on the Janiculum hill. The vista from that hill, which either kills or renders unconscious, the Japanese tourist is a famous overlook in Rome. (Some critics think the Japanese tourist collapses due to Stendhal syndrome – that is, a tourist swooning as a result of an overwhelming excess of beauty.)
Several scenes are filmed near Bernini’s fountain in Piazza Navone, across the Sant’ Agnese church. The small circular structure in which a little girl has been lost – she cries out to Jep from the crypt – is Il Tempietto by Bramante, a small Baroque mausoleum inside the courtyard of the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, a church erected on the site where St. Peter was crucified head-down on the Janiculum Hill.
The nude woman with the hammer-and-sickle razored into her pubic hair performs at Parco degli Acquedotti, a public park in Rome preserving ruins of aqueducts. Of course, many sequences in the film feature the Tiber River, particularly the beautiful bridges in the area of Hadrian’s Tomb, the Castello
During the night-time tour of Rome’s most beautiful buildings, Jep and company walk through the Barbarini Palace, specifically entering the Galeria Nazionale dell Antiqua Arte to see Raphael’s painting called La Fornarina ("The Female Baker"). The camera focuses on the picture, showing a nude woman covering her left breast with her right hand. Some writers believe that the model is covering her breast to conceal a cancerous tumor – probably, the reason that Sorrentino features the image in the movie: Rome’s beauty contains a cancerous rot.
During this nocturnal ramble, Jep with the stripper, Ramona, and Stefan enter the so-called Borromini colonnade, an architectural folly in the "secret garden" of the Palazzo Spada. Borromini designed the colonnade with forced perspective, creating the illusion that the corridor is more than 60 feet long, when, in fact, it is only 24 feet in depth. This "trompe l’oeil" corridor was once marked with a poem inscribed in marble concluding with the line: "The world’s grandeur is nothing but an illusion," a melancholy sentiment in keeping with the film’s theme.
Another stop on Stefan’s midnight tour is the Capitoline Museum, specifically its Palazzo Nuovo, where the camera briefly picks out fragmentary perspectives on the Dying Gaul, the Capitoline Venus, and Cupid with Psyche, all famous sculptures in that place. Finally, Stefan shows Jep and Romana, the famous view through the keyhole in the portone at the Villa del Priorato di Malta (the Palace of the Maltese Knight’s Templar) located on the Aventine Hill. That keyhole view shows the dome of St. Peters framed by ancient cypress trees.
Jep encounters the giraffe and magician in the cavernous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.
4.
Antecedents
The cinematic precursors to The Great Beauty are evident: La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 ½ (1963), and The Terrace (1980) by Ettore Scola. Sorrentino invokes these films from time to time, albeit obliquely – he claims that the main citation of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita are several shots of the Via Vittorio Venuto (the Via Veneto), the location of all the debauchery in that film, now "very much changed" and "unrecognizable" (since I don’t know Rome, I didn’t recognize the place myself.) It is helpful, perhaps, to summarize the thematic concerns of these films briefly in light of Sorrentino’s project in The Great Beauty.
In La Dolce Vita, Marcello Mastroianni plays a cynical journalist who longs to write a serious novel. Mastroianni’s best friend, Steiner, encourages him to work on his novel, but the journalist is continuously diverted by parties and womanizing. The film is haunted by religious ecstasy and suicide: in the country a little girl claims to have seen visions of the Virgin and one of the journalist’s girlfriends attempts suicide. At the end of the film, Steiner kills himself and his children. The journalist goes to an orgy that lasts until dawn. In the grey light of early morning, the exhausted party-goers wander out on the beach to look at "a sea monster" that has washed-up on the sand. A beautiful young girl beckons to the journalist but he turns away from her. Mastroianni is also featured in 8 ½. In that film, a director is working on an expensive science fiction movie – the film features vast ruinous sets at Cinecitta studios near Rome. The director is "blocked" and feels that he can not complete the big budget movie on which he is laboring. Like the journalist in La Dolce Vita, the director is distracted by parties and offers of sex from beautiful women – he may also be going mad since he is afflicted by nightmarish and surreal visions entangled with nostalgic recollections of his boyhood. In the end, as in The Great Beauty, the film that the director makes is not his high-budget planned project, but a film about not being able to make a film – in the end of The Great Beauty, Jep seems poised to begin writing another novel: the movie is about his odyssey toward a new book. The Terrace involves a group of Italian intellectuals who meet on a terrace overlooking Rome for a meal in which they discuss politics, art, and society – this film is evoked in The Grand Beauty primarily by Jep’s spectacular rooftop terrace overlooking the Roman Colosseum.
There is a literary antecedent to The Grand Beauty as well – a writer named Raffaele La Capria and his book, The Mortal Wound. La Capria is a Neapolitan writer – unlike Jep, he has been prolific and has written many notable screenplays as well as essays, short stories and translations. (He is well-known in Italy for translating T. S. Eliot into Italian.) La Capria’s book The Mortal Wound is about a summer love affair between a young man and a beautiful girl that "goes nowhere" but haunts the man for the rest of his life. Sorrentino has remarked on his admiration for the novel which he regards as a "great classic of Italian literature."
As remarked in the film, the French novelist, Flaubert, said that it was his ambition to write a novel about "nothing." In this context, "nothing" means rumor, gossip, and "a thousand ways of wasting time," Sorrentino says. (The word "nothing" here as the same meaning as in the characterization of the TV sitcom, Seinfeld, as a show about "nothing.") Watching the film, one is unavoidably reminded of the career of Truman Capote. By his mid-twenties, Capote had published several classic books, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s and seemed poised to become a writer equivalent to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the chronicler of the sixties and seventies and beyond. But, after In Cold Blood, Capote frittered his time away courting the rich and famous, appearing on talk shows and hosting extravagant and, now, legendary parties. Instead of making art, he transformed his day to day life into art. Like Jep, Capote continued to work as a journalist and published many interviews with famous and glamorous people, but he never wrote another great book. Like Jep, he drowned in the "vortices of night life" and became the arbiter of a glittering jet-set world – but, in this social whirl, he didn’t really have time to write.
5.
The Baroque
I don’t trust art-historical terms. In particular, I think it is gross falsification of the complexity of the history of styles and influences to claim that one specific type of art or creative expression is uniquely characteristic to an epoch. In my view, three principal modes of representation always co-exist: art can be mimetic (realistic) or it can be overtly stylized in two opposing modes: the classical versus the romantic. The romantic art made in Rome beginning around 1600 and, therefore, the expressive style that is most represented in the Eternal City has been called "the Baroque" – the artist who epitomizes the baroque is Bernini. I insist, however, that the baroque is a sub-species of the Romantic and opposed to classical canons of symmetry and decorum and perfected completion. Further, I insist that, in all eras, all three forms of representation (realistic, romantic and classical) are always present – sometimes, these differing modes of expression exist simultaneously in the same work of art.
The Grand Beauty is primarily baroque. This form of representation is consistent with the city where the story takes place. An opening shot of the muzzle of a cannon that fires a charge directly toward the camera that is deliriously craning back and away from this peril announces the baroque style in which the film will be presented. First, there is a pun: the opening shot is about a shot. Second, the image presents us with a theatrical event: a crowd of onlookers on the bridge above the cannon politely applaud the spectacle. Baroque art is fundamentally theatrical, designed as spectacle, as son et lumiere configured to involve the viewer. Finally, the cannon fired into the face of the audience establishes that the spectacle that the city presents will be enigmatic, inexplicable, and highly hazardous – you look at your risk. And, indeed, too much looking and participation can be deadly as witness the plight of the film’s hero.
Sorrentino constructs the film to mirror the consciousness of his protagonist, the bemused and melancholy Jep Gambardalla. Gambardalla is a flaneur, the man of the great city who spends his days exploring the alleys and byways of the city, looking for something – apparently, la grande Bellezza. The French word, flaneur, derives from flanerie, a term for "idly strolling," "ambling," "walking without objective." To the writers of Paris in the 19th century, the flaneur was the "city’s true sovereign," as Balzac noted, a man of leisure who enjoys "the gastronomy of the eye;" Baudelaire said that the flaneur perceived the city as a great work of art, a moving and living daguerrotype. In the 20th century, Walter Benjamin, in his massive, unfinished Arcades Project, characterized the flaneur as epitomizing modernity, the refined consciousness of the man who explores the city seeking its beauty and who remains remote, inaccessible, a connoisseur of the city’s secret treasures. Benjamin claimed that the flaneur represents a new aesthetic and, therefore, a new kind of sensibility – the flaneur is an intellectual dilettante, the detective and investigator of the city: one who sees and records, but does not intervene. To Benjamin, the figure of the flaneur was an emblem for a dispassionate modern bourgeois art, disengaged, dandyish, and exquisite. The flaneur, it should be noted, is the opposite of the gawker, the gaper – those who gawk at the city’s accidents and wonders are involved in them, stupefied and bewildered and beset by emotions of fear and identification. The flaneur has the opposite reaction – nothing that he sees touches him except as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Sorrentino devises the film to embody its themes. Jep is stalled and blocked; he makes no progress. As a consequence, the film’s time scheme is indecipherable. Time doesn’t really exist for Jep. Every day is like every other day. Indeed, as he ruefully points out, he goes to bed when others wake up and his nights are a continuous social vortex of partying, dinners, drinking, and flirtation. In the movie, we can’t tell how much time has passed. Presumably, Romana’s death must occupy several weeks or, even, months but we don’t experience the passage of time. Everything seems frozen in an eternal present.
Similarly, the film is fractured and episodic because Jep’s life has those characteristics. The movie doesn’t cohere into a narrative arc but Jep’s existence has lost the quality of a story. There is no plot, merely a sequence of highly colored and emotionally charged episodes. Space and time are fractured and treated as fragments, cubist elements in the composition. For instance, in the party scene featuring the little girl artist, we first see the child smeared with paint, forlorn, exhausted, a frightening apparition that materializes out of nowhere. Only later do we realize why the child is shown to us in this way – the film is presaging the emotional abuse inflicted upon this baby-artist, a kind of precocious Jackson Pollock. The image of the abused, paint-smeared moppet has leaped ahead of the narrative to reveal an aspect of cruelty and grotesque exploitation, something ghastly haunting the bright and elegant party: the truth is revealed before we are ready or prepared for the truth.
Like Jep, the film is de-centered, digressive – it wanders like a flaneur down one lane and, then, another. Although the movie is about Jep, the film slips away with him with ease to follow the adventures of other tangential characters. The center doesn’t hold; indeed, there may be no center. Instead, the movie tracks minor characters home from the party. We expect the film to remain tightly obedient to Jep’s activities, but, in fact, the narrative frequently abandons him to pursue other avenues, all of which turn out to be dead-ends. A woman mentions concerns about her son at a party. A few shots later we are with her in her dark palace. At the end of the hall, the woman’s son stands naked – he has painted himself red. Jep is nowhere to be seen – we have come home with the socialite after the party to encounter what she encounters. Of course, the de-centered character of the film, the movie’s willingness to show things from different perspectives, is announced at the outset: we see the mysterious death, or swoon, of the Japanese tourist. Jep, our hero, is nowhere to be seen and the opening episode serves as a kind of epigraph to the film, an introductory motto confirming the message conveyed by the cannon fired toward the camera in the beginning of the film: Rome’s great beauty is potentially lethal.
A film about the danger of distraction, The Great Beauty is itself continuously perplexed by distraction. The digressions, interludes, and episodes that lead nowhere are all epic, exhausting, encyclopediac in their scope. Sorrentino’s first, and favorite, cut of the movie was over 190 minutes long. Vast length is required to exhaust all avenues of meaning: Jep is shown searching for truth in the arts, erotic attachments, Leftist politics, and, at last, religion. In the end, memory shows him the path out of this labyrinth of disappointment. Sorrentino says that he wants "to exhaust the viewer" with his film.
In the first cut of the film, Jep interviews an elderly film maker. The man is still making movies and remarks that he remains younger than Manoela de Oliviera, the 104-year old Portuguese director. (We saw his ghost movie The Strange Case of Angelica last year.) The old man says that he wants to make a movie about a beautiful young girl whose eyes magically change in each shot from blue to green to violet to black. Jep asks the man how he came up with that idea. The elderly film maker describes how he was taken to see Turin’s first traffic light when he was a little boy. He was transfixed by the way the light changed from red to yellow to green – for me, he says, it was la granda Bellezza ("the great beauty"). Later, Jep is strolling in the campagna outside Rome and next to crumbling and ancient wall sees a traffic light incongruously installed in the green meadow. The light changes from red to green. Jep smiles.
6.
Vor dem Gesetz
Kafka wrote a parable apposite to The Great Beauty. The name of the parable is "Before the Law." If you don’t know this little story, you should read it. (The story is important to me personally: when I first learned to read German, I was proud of my newfound talent; I recall translating the story for my mother at the kitchen table when I was nineteen.)
Kafka’s story is about a man "from the country" who has a petition that he wishes to present to the Law. A formidable-looking gatekeeper guards the entry-way to the imperial city and its courtrooms that are said to be deep within the city and protected by many walls within walls. The man asks to be admitted to the city. The gatekeeper tells the petitioner that he can enter through his gate if he dares but that there will be many even more powerful and threatening gatekeepers guarding the entrances inside the outer wall. The petitioner decides to not venture through the gate until he has permission to enter. He takes up a stool and sits beside the gate for "days and months and years." The gatekeeper stands steadfastly by the open gate defending the entrance into the imperial city, an opening in the great wall that doesn’t seem to interest anyone else. When he has money, the petitioner tries to bribe the doorkeeper. The fierce gatekeeper takes the country man’s money but "only so you don’t feel like you haven’t made every attempt to be admitted." At last, the petitioner weakens and his eyes grow dim. He is dying of old age. As he slips into unconsciousness, the man from the country sees the gatekeeper rise to close the gate. From within the walls of the city, the man from the country sees a great radiance emanating from within, la grande Bellezza. Just before he falls falls unconscious, the dying man asks a question: "How is it that in all the years I waited at this gate no one else ever came here to seek admission?" "Because this was your gate," the gatekeeper replies, "and you were the only one who could enter here. But I am closing it now."
Kafka’s stories are often about the difficulties, indeed, the impossibilities of writing. One might paraphrase Kafka’s parable in these terms. A man sits down to write a great novel. During the first page of writing, he suffers terrible difficulties. Each sentence seemed harder to write than the last. After completing a couple of paragraphs, the man is exhausted. So he decides to wait with the blank paper in front of him until "inspiration" instructs him how to proceed. But inspiration does not come and the writer sits peering at the empty white space on the paper for days and months and years. Finally, it is time for the writer to die. Just before he slips into unconsciousness, the writer sees the white, blank page withering before his eyes, reduced to ash and dust. "Why has this happened?" the writer asks himself. "Surely, someone else could use this paper to write his novel." But, then, it occurs to the dying man that the book was his novel and his alone and could not be written by any other person. Perhaps, this thought inspires the writer to begin to frame sentences and paragraphs again, but it is too late: the paper has decayed to ash on the table before his dying eyes.
QUIZ
2. What does the bo in Bo-Tox stand for?
3. What did Sylvio Berlusconi call his orgies?
4. Jep visits the last place that the Minnesota tourists from White Bear Lake, Jerry and Barbara Heil, visited when they toured Italy. Name that place?
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