Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty has two small yet important facets in common with Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Both films begin with a profound quote that provides a key to the viewer for a full understanding of the film that follows. Both films use the music of “Dies Irae” (Requiem for my Friend, which includes Lacrimosa 2) by Zbigniew Preisner (the talented composer of Kieslowski’s Dekalog and The Three Colors trilogy) and Henryk Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony.
Just as Mallick used an interesting quote from the Book of Job, the opening quote for The Great Beauty is from Sorrentino’s favorite author Louis-Ferdinand
Céline's Journey to the End of the Night.
The quote is “To travel is very useful, it makes the
imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely
imaginary, which is its strength.”
The ‘travel’ in The Great Beauty is the figurative journey of Jep Gambardella, a
journalist who at the age of 20 wrote a novel that made him a celebrity and
propelled him into a cosmic trajectory of Rome’s high-life filled with the
glitterati and the cognoscenti for the next 45 years without having to write
another novel of substance. And he is celebrating his 65th birthday,
early in the film, with a birthday bash that many of us, including the Beatles,
who sang When I am 64, would dream
of enjoying.
There is “imagination” of the successful journalist Jep that
Sorrentino introduces us, the viewers, for the first time, smiling at the
camera, a lit cigarette dangling precariously between his teeth, dressed in fine
clothes cut to perfection by the best outfitters, in the midst of cavorting men
and women with loud music playing somewhere on a terrace of a building in the
center of Rome. Jep has it all--the women, the reputation, the money, the
circle of friends, and a lovely apartment near the Colosseum. To anyone who is familiar with Rome—that is
the best address one could dream of.
 |
| Jep (Toni Servillo), the misanthrope, smiling while surrounded by people |
For those who have seen Sorrentino’s earlier works The Consequence of Love and This Must be the Place, the director and his regular cinematographer Luca Bigazzi, the central figures of the
two movies are always shying away from people and a figurative distance is intentionally
created on screen by the talented cinematographer between individuals. In The Great Beauty, in contrast, Sorrentino and
Bigazzi show the central character Jep surrounded by people in close proximity.
Is it a reversal of positions? And yet Jep the central character is alone as in the previous films. In Jep’s own words “I'm not a misogynist, I'm a misanthrope.”
He loves women but distrusts or has a disdain for people irrespective of their
sex. The visuals are playing a trick on the mind of the viewer. As is the
music...but more on that later.
The “delusion and the pain” comes ‘the morning after’—to
quote and recall the 1986 Sidney Lumet film with that name. Jep, who is dancing
in the evenings, heads home to sleep when the children of the city are waking up to
go to school and less privileged workers are cleaning up the neighborhood preparing for the day that is dawning.
The “delusion and the pain” also comes when great art is
equated with the bizarre, as in the case of a screaming young girl who is considered
a genius of an art form, for her quixotic ability of throwing cans of paint on a
massive empty canvas as her fans watch the process of “art creation” with awe
and reverence. It is possible that Jep, the journalist, writes about her
extraordinary abilities. It is also possible that Jep, the journalist, writes
about the naked woman who is considered a major theatre personality who rushes
forward like a mad bull towards a stone wall only to butt her head against it
with a resounding sound that seems so real, bloody and painful. Sorrentino is
indeed underscoring the “delusion and the pain” with humor as he always does,
trusting that his film’s viewer would keep Céline's quotation in focus.
 |
| Not a misogynist |
One of the finest punches of left-handed humorous self-compliments
comes from Jep himself: “To this
question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: "Pussy". Whereas I answered "The
smell of old people's houses". The
question was "What do you really like the most in life?" I was destined for sensibility. I was
destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.” There
is yet another favorite sequence for this critic. The ladies’ man Jep
encounters the famous French actress Fanny Ardant with an unusual hairdo and exclaims “Madame Ardant!” The
actress looks at him from head to toe and slowly responds “Bonne nuit!” (Good night!) and walks away with a smile.
But in The Great
Beauty, Sorrentino has positioned his lead character Jep as an intellectual
searching for beauty in a city that can truly boast of true man-made beauty
with its sculptures, its fountains, its legendary buildings, its history, its beautiful
women propped up by costly botox injections, its river Tiber, and wait, the incredible
neighboring city state of Vatican and with its population of the pious priests,
Cardinals and nuns who intermingle with the other Roman friends of Jep. And since
Sorrentino is not a gnostic like Malick, Jep interviews a toothless “104-year-old”
nun “who lives on roots” (note the layer of humor in that factoid) who seems
to have an odd visual resemblance to Mother Teresa but has found time to have
read Jep’s famous book and utters pedestrian and inane comments. The agnostic
Sorrentino goes a step further when Jep the journalist interacts with a
Cardinal, tipped to be the next Pope, who prefers to give a discourse on a cooking
recipe rather than matters of theology.
 |
| The sacred and the profane |
Forget the visuals. Concentrate on the music in The Great Beauty. Sorrentino deliberately
chooses to play pieces of music that directors such as Malick and Kieslowski
used to lift their audiences to a lofty spiritual level. Then Sorrentino contrasts
those moments with loud banal party music when he chooses to provide a contrast
of life’s reality apparently noted by Jep during his past 45 years. It is not
without meaning that Jep’s close friend asks Jep to find a husband for his daughter
in her forties who performs in a strip club. There are several constant connections
between the sacred and the profane.
Towards the end of the film Jep states “This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life,
hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah... It's all settled beneath the chitter
chatter and the noise, silence and sentiment, emotion and fear. The haggard,
inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity.
All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world, blah,
blah, blah... Beyond there is what lies beyond. And I don't deal with what lies
beyond. Therefore... let this novel begin. After all... it's just a trick. Yes,
it's just a trick.” Probably those are the words of Jep’s second novel yet
to be written at the age of 65. Earlier Jep had told the viewer “I was looking for the great beauty, but I
didn’t find it.”
Perhaps a true Sorrentino admirer would prefer his lesser
known Consequences of Love (2004)
which towards its enigmatic end had the words “Sadness descends upon him and he starts to think...” describing the
best friend of the protagonist, working at correcting a fault perched high up on
an electric pylon, alone, battling biting cold winds.
 |
| "Sadness descends upon him and he starts to think.." words from Consequences of Love |
To understand Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty one needs to revert to his favorite writer Céline
whose words from the same literary work that opens the film explains it all : “In the whole of your absurd past you
discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be
a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away
from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to
see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind,
take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really
gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see
what people and things really look like.” Céline has countless admirers and
detractors. His detractors call him a fascist, anti-Semitist, and a bigot. Like
Sorrentino’s characters, Céline’s fictional characters are constantly facing
anxiety and failure.
Without any doubt, both The
Tree of Life and The Great Beauty
are truly majestic works of cinema: one optimistic, the other misanthropic. Sorrentino is one of finest filmmakers alive in Italy. And like very few other directors he writes his own original screenplays, in this particular case, taking the aid of another screenplay professional, Umberto Contarello. The misanthropy and the negativism that prevails in The Great Beauty are the only reason that this critic found less staggeringly well-made films, such as Still Life (2013) and Tangerines (2013), products of less talented
directors than Sorrentino to be offering a whiff of oxygen.
P.S. The Great Beauty
is on the author’s list of his top 10 movies of 2013. Two earlier Sorrentino films—Consequences of Love and This Must be the Place--were reviewed earlier on this blog. The films mentioned in this review The Tree of Life, Dekalog, Three Colors, Still Life and Tangerines were also reviewed earlier on this blog. Mr Sorrentino is also one of the author's 15 favourite active filmmakers
