The Greatness of “La Grande Belleza”

Paolo Sorrentino’s new film, ‘La Grande Belleza (The Great Beauty),’ follows the long faced Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), an aging Italian writer and languidly energetic socialite.

Four decades ago, Jep wrote a highly acclaimed novel called ‘The Human Apparatus,’ but has not written a book since, instead working occasionally as a journalism while spending his nights submersed an elite socialite lifestyle of decadent parties, dinners, drinks and drugs. His voiceovers are self-aware, lonely. When he first arrived on Rome’s social scene, he says he wanted to be “the king of the high life,” with the power not only to attend parties but also the power to “make them a failure.” Now, four decades later, Jep owns Roman social life, but still finds himself deeply unfulfilled. He bounces back and forth between the sorrow prompted by memories of an old love that has just died, and his new, not quite fulfilling, romance with a stripper named Ramona.

We meet Gambardella in the midst of his 65^th birthday party, at a debaucherous rooftop celebration in Rome where electronic music pulses, a lecherous old man hisses at spray-tanned and spandex clad young women, an aging moviestar bursts out of a cake, and a midget woman slowly drinks herself to sleep in the corner. In a series of immersive visuals, the crowd parts for a line dance, and through a tunnel of outstretched, flexing hands and arms, we see Jep standing alone in the middle, a cigarette clenched in his teeth. Servillo emotes heavily – he dances, but with his eyes closed to an inner world that we can tell is painfully self-aware. When he opens them, his eyebrows slouch parenthetically upwards and his mouth sets into a look of almost casual dismay. Jep may drift in the present, vibrant moments of his social scene, but Servillo’s sad eyes and long, lined face emit a pathos that is almost wise, almost ancient. Jep, we come to understand, is vitally aware of his own tender insecurities, his disillusionment, and his disorientation in time and space. He bemoans his sleep schedule and lifestyle to his grounded housekeeper, but shrugs his shoulders to the external refrain from his friends and acquaintances – “Why didn’t you ever write another book?”

Although he spends his time with young actresses, aging poets, and the generally rich and famous, Jep consistently cuts down or dismisses any pretentions that the participants in his shallow lifestyle may make to youth, sincerity, or legitimacy. When one of his friends speaks with pride about her writing, political work and family, Jep criticizes her brutally, pitilessly exposing the tender insecurities at the center of her arrogance – implying that to lie to one’s self may be necessary, but to make such pretenses loudly is just embarrassing. Yet in his dismissal of his friends’ claims, Jep betrays his awareness of his own decline, and his lack of fulfillment and his fears.

Jep seems desensitized to the spaces he occupies, even as Sorrentino follows him around a city full of buildings, monuments and statues with deep artistic and religious significance. In one of the film’s most ethereal sequences, Jep speaks to a mysterious man at an outdoor, nighttime party – an old acquaintance, we assume – who produces a hefty metal box of keys that open the doors to ‘the most beautiful buildings in Rome.’ Jep and his girlfriend Ramona embark on a nighttime odyssey (detached, as far as I could tell, from spatial logic) through these buildings, and peruse famous statues, paintings and monuments by the light of their guide’s candles.

When on this midnight journey they encounter a trio of princesses playing poker around a table, it’s only characteristic of the surreal imagery that interspersed in Sorrentino’s style. Jep works for a midget woman with blue hair, a CGI giraffe makes a brief appearance, and the movie’s last act involves an aging, saintly nun with two crooked teeth. Also surreal, and sometimes even perverse, are the entertainers that Jep encounters – a knifethrower marks the outline of his shivering assistant; a young girl forced by her parents to ‘perform’ at a gathering screams as she hurls buckets of paint towards an enormous canvas; Jep meets and romances an aging stripper who still performs in her father’s strip club. Here, the comparisons to Fellini are inevitable and mostly accurate, but Sorrentino retains a unique voice and a distinct, modern vision.

Sorrentino’s use of Rome’s religious imagery is particularly immersive, and pointed. That the people, statues and buildings that surround Jep are all imbued with a deep religious significance, stands in stark contrast to his inability to find meaning in his life – he is looking for a ‘great beauty’ to appear, unable to turn around or start over for anything lesser. When he says early on that tourists are the only good people in the city, he seems to cut towards that truth – the tourists see what the native Romans are numbed to. The great beauty, Jep monologues, exists somewhere beneath and within humanity’s miserable smallness, somewhere not above or behind but within the great “embarrassment of being in the world.” Sorrentino’s extravagant, entrancing odyssey finally illustrates that what Jep has been waiting for can’t be waited for. Great beauty has been there all along.