La Grande Bellezza / The Great Beauty, 13.9.13

“History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.”   (Pietros Maneos, The Italian Pleasures of Gabriele Paterkallos)   

At 2h20, Paolo Sorrentino’s lushly visual film was an extended elegy for terminal decadence and a ‘state-of-the nation’ epic. The magnificently expressive Toni Servillo played Jep Gambardello, a wealthy 65yo Roman socialite with a roof-top apartment overlooking the Colosseum (in much the same place as Nero’s ‘Domus Aurea’).  After early literary success and a stillborn youthful love affair, he’s wasted forty years partying.

Toni Servillo as Jap Gambardello, thoroughly at home with the Roman Baroque

 
“Non volevo essere semplicemente un mondano, volevo diventare il re dei mondanito” -

‘I didn’t want to be simply a playboy but to become the king of the playboys’  

Superficially, the film charted Jep's journey towards understanding his own pointlessness, but the character was really a metaphor for Berlusconi’s ‘bunga bunga’ Italy as a whole. 

Sorrentino ticked all the boxes in the course of this giro d’orizzonte of the surface glitter and cynicism of his native land:
botoxed over-sexualised middle-aged élites oblivious to their suicidal youngsters, facially-wasted cardinals interested more in their palates than their souls, impeccably-coutoured Mafiosi, aristocrats-for-hire nostalgic for past glories, blaggard self-deceiving "communists" living in luxury, unhealthy obsessions with angelic children and (probably fraudulent) religiosity, even a passing shot of the stricken ‘Costa Concordia’. 

Caravaggio's Medusa

And all of it unfolding in the carnivalesque context of Caravaggio’s Roma, with the weight of history and art bearing down upon the living in a city which has seen it all and knows there’s nothing new under the sun. 

The weight of Sorrentino’s revulsion bore comparison with Pasolini’s takes on Mussolini’s times.  But the hopelessness was partly offset by visual jokes: the dwarf editor over-shadowed by huge spectacles and a giant Teddy in the corner of her office, the CGI flamingos scattered on the breath of a dying Nun, a giraffe magically disappearing in the Baths of Caracalla:  ‘e solo un truco, amico (it’s just a trick buddy) e solo un truco!  

Fanny Ardant

While hinting that Italy's adoration of surfaces, ‘life as performance’ and the ‘great beauty’ of the title is part of its problem, Sorrentino replicated those same obsessions.  The characters were ‘types’: Carlo Verdone was Romano (Jep’s fatty actor-buddy who leaves the city that’s ‘disappointed him’), Sabrina Ferrilli was the curvaceous Ramona (an ageing tart desperate for a real connection) while Pamela Villoresi and Galatea Ranzi were stunningly cheek-boned matronly ‘mondani’.  Even that most worldly of French stars, Fanny Ardant, made a brief and exquisitely-outfitted appearance.

Bernini's Medusa

Flick benefited from a to-die-for soundtrack which alternated drug-fuelled drumbeats and devotional simplicity (Tavener’s ‘The Lamb’ etc).  This was as far from Merkelian Protestant austerity as you can get, perhaps the closest the cinema has got to incarnating the ‘Baroque’ in all its fatal splendour. 

We’re going to hell in a handcart and we know it was the message, but we’re damned if we're not going to put on a great show as we go down ...