Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Writers: Paulo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello
Photography: Luca Bigazzi
Music: Lele Marchitelli
Editor: Cristiano Travaglioli
Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Giovanna Vignola, Galatea Ranzi, Sonia Gessner, Anna Della Rosa, Luca Marinelli, Giusi Merli, Roberto Herlitzka
Purely by coincidence I was looking at Italian director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte a week or two before looking at Italian director and cowriter Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. The Great Beauty came out over 50 years later but I thought I saw a good deal of basic similarities as I was watching: a main character who is an Italian novelist wandering his city (Rome or Milan), an unfocused rolling gait to events, music, parties, carousing, philosophizing, evading. Wikipedia affirms critics have seen homages in The Great Beauty to La Notte, as well as to Italian director Federico Fellini’s Roma and 8½ and Italian director Ettore Scola’s The Terrace and Splendor.
I still need to catch up on the Scolas myself but certainly can see The Great Beauty locating itself within Italian cinematic traditions. It admirably lives up to them too. I don’t know Sorrentino beyond this one—his IMDb known-fors also include This Must Be the Place (2011), Youth (2015), and The Hand of God (2021)—and I only came to this one recently. The Great Beauty focuses on the peregrinations about his home city of Rome that Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) makes as he turns 65. Jep published a novel when he was 25, highly regarded and widely read and known, but has not written another one since. He is able to live on its proceeds and also works now as a culture journalist at an arts magazine published and edited by a charismatic dwarf, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola). He is pursued constantly by people who love his novel and want to know why he never wrote another, to which he has shifting answers. He has reached an age when it is natural to look back and reflect. Not that that is what he is doing.
Purely by coincidence I was looking at Italian director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte a week or two before looking at Italian director and cowriter Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. The Great Beauty came out over 50 years later but I thought I saw a good deal of basic similarities as I was watching: a main character who is an Italian novelist wandering his city (Rome or Milan), an unfocused rolling gait to events, music, parties, carousing, philosophizing, evading. Wikipedia affirms critics have seen homages in The Great Beauty to La Notte, as well as to Italian director Federico Fellini’s Roma and 8½ and Italian director Ettore Scola’s The Terrace and Splendor.
I still need to catch up on the Scolas myself but certainly can see The Great Beauty locating itself within Italian cinematic traditions. It admirably lives up to them too. I don’t know Sorrentino beyond this one—his IMDb known-fors also include This Must Be the Place (2011), Youth (2015), and The Hand of God (2021)—and I only came to this one recently. The Great Beauty focuses on the peregrinations about his home city of Rome that Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) makes as he turns 65. Jep published a novel when he was 25, highly regarded and widely read and known, but has not written another one since. He is able to live on its proceeds and also works now as a culture journalist at an arts magazine published and edited by a charismatic dwarf, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola). He is pursued constantly by people who love his novel and want to know why he never wrote another, to which he has shifting answers. He has reached an age when it is natural to look back and reflect. Not that that is what he is doing.
Or, well, maybe—reflecting, with regret, on his mortality, if anything, which he can’t help. Wondering, at another level, whether he has wasted his life on sin. He doesn’t think so. But he’s not sure how others feel about it. Certainly at first he is carrying on with youthful partying ways. After a lengthy headnote from Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night and some establishing shots of Rome in the early morning, the movie rolls in with the scene of Jep’s well-attended 65th birthday party like heavy weather from the sea, initiated by a fashionable woman screaming down the house. It’s all human beauty, dancing, costumes, sex, danger, more screaming, more dancing, a wild mix of thumping droning music and a mariachi band somehow too.
The Great Beauty is never again as thrilling as the eight minutes or so of that party—later brief party scenes are only disappointing tastes and reprises of it—but the momentum carries us well into the second hour. The picture, largely thanks to Servillo’s performance, is rarely ever less than interesting and always at least close to sumptuous to watch. We see exotic and violent lampoons of performance art head-butting bridge abutments, a botox doctor at work in a popular and expensive clinic, action painting in performance, points of funeral etiquette, a live giraffe, and more. Jep’s best friends are a man named Romano (Carlo Verdone) and a woman named Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli), which together seem suspiciously when-in-Rome-like. The arc of the picture wends from the 65th birthday party scene almost Great Gatsby style, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly, into the long views of a 65-year-old approaching a spiritual experience with a 104-year-old nun who wants to know why he never wrote another book.
Even at 65, as we see, Jep likes to party, but he is not particularly a womanizer or drunk. He’s like a version of the Dos Equis guy, perhaps slightly befuddled, the most interesting man alive, cultured, debonair, always gentlemanly, not often seen drinking beer. Jep sincerely and plainly loves the sensory pleasures of life and being alive. That includes the modern world and all its high quality of life ways. Living well is the best, etc. But he appreciates, far more deeply, the beauty of antiquity too, the blending of life with the long-perished. He keenly feels the past wherever he goes. In many ways The Great Beauty is about the love affair of a man and his great city. The credits roll at the end runs nearly 10 minutes accompanied by slow ambling footage from a boat down a canal which passes under a good many ancient-feeling bridges. It’s palpable love for Rome.
A lot of eternity is packed into The Great Beauty. Jep’s encounter toward the end with Sister Maria, known as “the Saint” (Giusi Merli), feels like a showdown somehow between his sense of beauty and earthly pleasure and the Roman Catholic Church’s. There is definitely something extra-worldly about Sister Maria, as her control of flamingos in one remarkable if unlikely scene is at pains to show. Jep sees it too and, in the end, thanks in no small part exactly to that flamingos moment, seems to understand with us that they are not in opposition at all. It’s no sin to love the beauty that does exist in the world.
The Great Beauty is never again as thrilling as the eight minutes or so of that party—later brief party scenes are only disappointing tastes and reprises of it—but the momentum carries us well into the second hour. The picture, largely thanks to Servillo’s performance, is rarely ever less than interesting and always at least close to sumptuous to watch. We see exotic and violent lampoons of performance art head-butting bridge abutments, a botox doctor at work in a popular and expensive clinic, action painting in performance, points of funeral etiquette, a live giraffe, and more. Jep’s best friends are a man named Romano (Carlo Verdone) and a woman named Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli), which together seem suspiciously when-in-Rome-like. The arc of the picture wends from the 65th birthday party scene almost Great Gatsby style, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly, into the long views of a 65-year-old approaching a spiritual experience with a 104-year-old nun who wants to know why he never wrote another book.
Even at 65, as we see, Jep likes to party, but he is not particularly a womanizer or drunk. He’s like a version of the Dos Equis guy, perhaps slightly befuddled, the most interesting man alive, cultured, debonair, always gentlemanly, not often seen drinking beer. Jep sincerely and plainly loves the sensory pleasures of life and being alive. That includes the modern world and all its high quality of life ways. Living well is the best, etc. But he appreciates, far more deeply, the beauty of antiquity too, the blending of life with the long-perished. He keenly feels the past wherever he goes. In many ways The Great Beauty is about the love affair of a man and his great city. The credits roll at the end runs nearly 10 minutes accompanied by slow ambling footage from a boat down a canal which passes under a good many ancient-feeling bridges. It’s palpable love for Rome.
A lot of eternity is packed into The Great Beauty. Jep’s encounter toward the end with Sister Maria, known as “the Saint” (Giusi Merli), feels like a showdown somehow between his sense of beauty and earthly pleasure and the Roman Catholic Church’s. There is definitely something extra-worldly about Sister Maria, as her control of flamingos in one remarkable if unlikely scene is at pains to show. Jep sees it too and, in the end, thanks in no small part exactly to that flamingos moment, seems to understand with us that they are not in opposition at all. It’s no sin to love the beauty that does exist in the world.
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