Paolo Sorrentino
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La Dolce Vita (1960)
Directed by Federico Fellini
influenced The Great Beauty (2013), The Hand of God (2021), Loro (2018)
Themes
The Italian title for Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is La Grande Bellezza, which much more closely evokes its main source of inspiration: the wondrous Federico Fellini opus La Dolce Vita.
Federico Fellini is an obvious touch point here: Sorrentino nods to both the corrosive hedonism of La Dolce Vita and the emotional paralysis of 8½, but his sensuous images outdo even the master’s.
This is Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), narrator and subject of The Great Beauty , who knows too well that he’s been living in a reminiscence of La Dolce Vita and seems to have accepted it with wry but weary resignation.
In blatant reference to La dolce vita, The Great Beauty is an apt if lazily postmodern response to Fellini’s question: how can we convert nihilism from an existential plague into a decent way of life?
The story of Jep’s plush detachment from the real world, and the crisis of soul he’d have if he could be certain he had a soul, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is an utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty that evokes Fellini’s La Dolce Vita by way of Baz Luhrmann.
Writer/director Paolo Sorrentino's ("Il Divo," "This Must Be the Place") latest has been described as an homage to "La Dolce Vita," but this film is more ambitious, the filmmaker not only preserving a cultural moment in time as experienced by a bon vivant journalist, but expressing the man's interior thoughts cinematically, a jaded man's ability to still experience the glories of life amidst a social circle defined by its depraved snobbery, ostentation and gossip.
8½ (1963)
Directed by Federico Fellini
influenced The Great Beauty (2013), The Hand of God (2021), Youth (2015)
Themes Characters Visuals
Federico Fellini is an obvious touch point here: Sorrentino nods to both the corrosive hedonism of La Dolce Vita and the emotional paralysis of 8½, but his sensuous images outdo even the master’s.
Things literally start off with a bang as the noontime cannon on the Janiculum Hill is fired, leading to a montage of Japanese tourists and local eccentrics among the area’s Risorgimento monuments, the latter characters recalling the menagerie of women at the spa in “8½.”
Beginning with the sudden death of a Japanese tourist and ending with a 103-year-old nun’s arduous climb on her knees up the steps of St. John’s Church, The Great Beauty is gratefully indebted to three films by Federico Fellini: La Dolce Vita, 8½ and Roma.
As others have observed, and as may be obvious from that synopsis, Sorrentino’s film owes a great debt to the work of Federico Fellini, most notably to 8½.
Like 8½, Sorrentino’s film floats ecstatically on a sea of free-associative and surreal thoughts and images.
If The Great Beauty was Paolo Sorrentino’s extravagant homage to La Dolce Vita — with nods also to 8½ and Roma — The Hand of God is the Italian Oscar winner’s Amarcord .
La Notte (1961)
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
influenced The Great Beauty (2013)
Themes Characters
Sorrentino’s spectacularly ornate assessment of modern Rome is peppered with references to other Italian cinematic totems as well, like Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, which indicates just how audacious the movie is.
La Dolce Vita is the most obvious one but the list also includes Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City and Michelangelo Antonioni's La notte, among others.
It’s an accurate and damning group portrait, only barely updated from those depicted by Fellini, Scola and the Antonioni of “La notte.”
Brashly stepping up and standing beside Giovanni from Antonioni’s “La Notte” and Marcello from Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” is Jep Gambardella from Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grand Bellezza.”
The more obvious references, however, are to the films of Federico Fellini, from the excesses of "Satyricon" and affectionate nostalgia of "Amarcord" to the assessment of an artist's life in "81/2."
The startling appearance of a giraffe recalls the vision of the peacock in the snow in Fellini’s “ Amarcord .”
It feels like Sorrentino’s nod to The Wolf of Wall Street, but it’s not at all in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film.
It’s a stance Scorsese has taken on many an occasion ( The Wolf of Wall Street comparisons are hard to escape here) but his editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, understands the need for forward momentum and leaving the pretensions at home.
A wild ride of a movie through the life and oh-so-good times of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s once and future (maybe?) prime minister (and media magnate), it recalls Martin Scorsese’s 2013 The Wolf of Wall Street in its cinematic glorification of excess in the name of condemning that excess.
The effect of these many parties is akin to the ceaseless soirees of The Wolf of Wall Street : You instinctively turn away, find yourself drawn back like a moth to a flame, revel in the chaos, then become endlessly bored by it.
Hard to say what it is, beyond a sprawling mess that caters so exclusively to the male gaze it makes The Wolf of Wall Street look like a children’s tea party.
Combining the social satire of Fellini with the sinful hedonism of latter-day Scorsese – think La Dolce Vita via The Wolf of Wall Street – the party sequences are a riot of decadence.
Set in an upscale Swiss spa (and shot on location at the Berghotel Schatzalp, the inspiration for Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"), "Youth" is a kind of landlocked "Ship of Fools" following the interactions of several characters during their stay at the resort.
Sorrentino entrecruza sus historias y reúne a las celebridades a la manera de aquellos dramas sentimentales que el cine hollywoodense solía concentrar en un espacio fastuoso, ya fuera Grand hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) o, con menor glamour, La nave del mal (Ship of fools, Stanley Kramer, 1965), según la novela homónima de Katherine Anne Porter.
Beginning with the sudden death of a Japanese tourist and ending with a 103-year-old nun’s arduous climb on her knees up the steps of St. John’s Church, The Great Beauty is gratefully indebted to three films by Federico Fellini: La Dolce Vita, 8½ and Roma.
The magical atmosphere of Fellini’s "Roma" and "La Dolce Vita" pervades Paolo Sorrentino's update on cynicism, premiering in competition.
Plays at times like a more conventional, less daring version of 1972’s Roma...On its own merits, Sorrentino’s film ain’t half-bad, but it’s no Fellini picture.
The film is unimaginable without the influences of Fellini’s two masterpieces, “La Dolce Vita” and “Roma.”
The film will inevitably draw comparisons to Fellini classics like La Dolce Vita, 8 ½ and Roma, but the Fellini halo effect could prove especially advantageous.
He won the 2013 foreign-language Oscar for “The Great Beauty,” one of the best movies of the past decade, and follows this up with his second English-language film, ‘Youth,” an equally stunning film visually that evokes memories of Fellini’s “8 1/2” and “Juliet of the Spirits.”
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Directed by Robert Aldrich
influenced Youth (2015)
Characters
Fonda delivers a high voltage and tantalisingly short cameo; it plays like she’s channelling the spirit of Bette Davis circa What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in a vignette from Mulholland Drive.
“Youth,” his latest, a lush English-language production, might be described as a hybrid evocation of Fellini’s semi-autobiographical “8A” and Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s scandalous novella “Death in Venice.”
Youth is a good bit like Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) and has elements of Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) — with maybe just a touch of Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) — but is ultimately, its own beautiful thing.
And what better locale than the hermetic elements of a spa resort — a setting that unmistakably calls to mind Thomas Mann, Anton Chekhov, “Last Year at Marienbad” and “8 ½,” among many others.
The provisional nature of the hotel was put to its most haunting use in Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, in which every element from memory to topography was thrown into doubt.
Consider his depiction of old flesh longing for young, in which Caine and Keitel, reclining one night in a hot tub, watch in awe as a nude Miss Universe (Mădălina Diana Ghenea) settles in across from them; now compare this to the skin-crawling discomfiture of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love (2012), or Larry Clark stepping in front of the camera to slurp up a teenager’s toe jam in The Smell of Us (2014).
Youth is a good bit like Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) and has elements of Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) — with maybe just a touch of Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) — but is ultimately, its own beautiful thing.
She strolls in like she just got off the set of Sunset Boulevard as Brenda travels to the Alps for a blistering chat with Mick, and her performance might as well have a big “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION” plastered across the screen.
This fails to have a the impact the filmmaker appears to be seeking, perhaps because at this point Fonda brings her own baggage to any film role so you don’t quite buy her as a Gloria Swanson/“Sunset Boulevard” drag queen.
Sorrentino entrecruza sus historias y reúne a las celebridades a la manera de aquellos dramas sentimentales que el cine hollywoodense solía concentrar en un espacio fastuoso, ya fuera Grand hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) o, con menor glamour, La nave del mal (Ship of fools, Stanley Kramer, 1965), según la novela homónima de Katherine Anne Porter.
A rather incestuous relationship with her depressed brother and their shared friend Sandri skirts around Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) territory before ending in Riamondo’s suicide, a plot twist which seems instantly inevitable when the film segues to 1968, a dramatic catalyst which is leaned on quite heavily.
Cheyenne’s road trip to Michigan, New Mexico, and Utah has the feel of a Wim Wenders journey, thus it’s altogether appropriate that Wenders’ Paris, Texas star, Harry Dean Stanton, makes a poetically resonant appearance here as the man who patented the idea of attaching wheels to luggage.
Altering a phrase from John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006), it reminds me of La Dolce Vita but with less hope.
Journey to the End of the Night (2006)
Directed by Eric Eason
influenced The Great Beauty (2013)
Themes
The film’s tone is set by an opening on-screen quotation from French writer Celine’s bitterly misanthropic 1930s novel Journey to the End of the Night.
And that’s when I realized what this movie is: It’s really just Mike Leigh’s Naked all over again… except that this time the sadistic philosopher is a celebrated, wealthy writer who looks pretty cool as he tears the world down around him.