The Great Beauty

Winner of the most recent Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The Great Beauty is a movie with big ideas, the kind of film that can't be discussed until a certain amount of time is allowed for intellectual digestion. After more than 24 hours, I'm still not sure I have a handle on it.

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, the film can and has been described as an updated version of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, with a bit of Antonioni's La Notte sprinkled in. The subject of all these films is the decadence of Rome's social elite. Sorrentino doesn't hide the homage to Fellini, with surreal elements like a giraffe, a 104-year-old nun, and even a dwarf.

The protagonist is Jep Gambardella, played by Toni Servillo. After an enigmatic (and never explained) opening scene involving Japanese tourists, the film switches to his 65th birthday party, a frenetically edited scene that has visceral vitality. Servillo is a journalist covering the cultural beat, although he did write one novel in his 20's, but never wrote another one.

Over the course of the film, Servillo will survey his life, remembering his first love (he learns that she dies, and that she always loved him, even more than her long-time husband) and living the high life, a creature of the night. Though he lives in Rome, which is shown off to great effect (he has an apartment overlooking the Coliseum) he is jaded. Late in the film, we learn the meaning of the title--he hasn't written a book because he hasn't found the Great Beauty, but of course beauty is all around him.

This is a film that requires concentration. I respected it more than I liked it--it asks viewers to look for meaning, and I'm not sure it's always there. For example, the film's last section involves that nun, a Mother Teresa like figure called "the Saint," who is visiting Rome, along with a factotum who does all the talking for her. Italy, of course, is an extremely Catholic country (Fellini never shied away from including clergy in his films). Maybe it takes a Catholic sensibility to get the significance of this section, except for the humorous aspect of a Cardinal, once the greatest exorcist in Europe, now unable to talk about anything but cooking.

Jep is single and childless, and has a couple of relationships in the film. He sleeps with a younger woman, but steals away, because "when you turn 65, you don't waste time doing things you don't want to do." Later he will befriend and then sleep with the daughter of an old friend, a woman who is still a stripper at age 42 who has medical problems.

There are also little tributaries of plot concerning Jep's friends, like a man who wants to mount a theatrical performance and is basically ignored by his girlfriend, a woman with a mentally ill son, and a count and countess who hire themselves out for social events.

The Great Beauty is haunted by the specter of death, but is also quite funny. Servillo gives a performance in a part that we might imagine Marcello Mastroanni in, but he makes his own--we would love to hang out with him, chatting on his terrace with his friends. He also has a gimlet eye, such as when he interviews a performance artist, a woman who runs naked into stone walls.

One effect this film will have--if one has been to Rome, one will want to return after seeing it, or, with people like me, who have never been, there will just be further fuming that we haven't gotten there yet.