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La grande bellezza (2013)
 
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Director:
Paolo
Sorrentino |
COUNTRY
Italy/France |
GENRE
Drama |
INTERNATIONAL TITLE
The
Great Beauty |
NORWEGIAN TITLE
Den
store skjønnheten |
RUNNING
TIME
142 minutes |
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Producer:
Nicola Giuliano
Francesca Cima
Fabio Conversi |
Screenwriter:
Paolo
Sorrentino
Umberto Contarello |
Review
In
La Grande Bellezza, an at face value old-fashioned,
European-style cultural-elitist film, writer/director Paolo
Sorrentino throws an influx of ideas at you, but in the most
beautiful and hypnotic manner. The first half of this motion picture
is among the compositionally richest in a long time, a true tribute
to the art-form; something in the spirit of
Godard or Fellini, had
they had the necessary means and access to present-day Rome − the city to which
La Grande Bellezza is both a homage and a death sentence.
The
underlying theme here is one of loss − of youth, love, opportunity,
meaning, et cetera. Not very uplifting stuff, had it not been for the
fact that our protagonist revels in it; uses it to keep himself
afloat, to keep himself at the level of self-worth he once envisioned
for himself. In other words, our Jep Gambardella is a nostalgic, and
so is Sorrentino and his film, who both let Jep live his decadent
life in constant and disillusioned yearning for an era which they
believe is long gone. That era was filled with beauty, youth and
optimism, but it was also filled with other disillusioned old-timers,
implies Sorrentino. And although Jep never finds any form of
awakening (he is much too cynical and self-conscious for that), he
does, at least intellectually, come to realise that the beauty he's
missing, "la grande bellezza", still is very much around him. And
more importantly, that it still exists within him in the form of memories,
ideas and attributions.
La Grande Bellezza is not an
ingenious, game-changing film with all the answers, but it is an
insightful work of art that combines an almost endless artistic
value with a relevant and perceptive social comment.
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