The Great Beauty (2013)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Jep Gambardella has seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades, but after his 65th birthday and a shock from the past, Jep looks past the nightclubs and parties to find a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.
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24 films that influenced The Great Beauty
What critics say influenced The Great Beauty
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.
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.
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 .”
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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.
Altering a phrase from John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006), it reminds me of La Dolce Vita but with less hope.
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.
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Claire Denis is a remarkable director ( Beau Travail , The Intruder , White Material ), but in this case she has made an absorbing but pretentious puzzle out of a rather empty (yet nasty) set-up.
Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza in Italian) is relief at last—not that the key word in the title, or the Italian provenance, should mislead you into thinking this is anywhere near the monstrous claptrap of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, a film that so many people cherished that I am doing all I can to summon forgiveness, on the condition that we never mention it again.