Thursday, February 6, 2014

A review of "The Great Beauty"

 "The Great Beauty, a shimmering coup de cinema to make your heart burst, has won the 2014 Golden Globe for best foreign film".  The Telegraph.

The Great Beauty

By Beth Rubin

Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a cynical yet vulnerable  journalist-novelist and man about town,  celebrates his 65th birthday with a menagerie of friends and hangers-on at his penthouse terrace overlooking the Colisseum. (Doesn’t everybody?)  Paying homage to Fellini ( “La Dolce Vita,” “Satyricon,” and ”8 ½”) , a conga line of inebriated, coke-snorting partygoers with outlandish body accoutrements and vacant stares, snakes around the terrace. Here, Grand Guignol meets the Theatre of the Absurd in blazing color. Debonair in his oiled hair, primary-color  blazers and tan slacks , pocket square just so, Jep hasn’t had a hit in 40 years since his novel, “The Human Apparatus,”  took  the literary scene by storm.  He’s “laughing on the outside, crying on the inside,” as the old song goes, hanging on in a netherworld which alternately excites, chafes, disappoints, and bores him.

Then he learns that the love of his life has died, and reality comes a knocking.
What follows in writer-director’s Paolo Sorrentino’s brilliant homage to Rome─its sights, citizenry, and tourists; classicism and debauchery; social, political and religious institutionsare a series of interwoven vignettes, all lushly filmed, that illuminate Jep’s coming to terms with his mortality. He examines assumptions old and new in a most poetic way, by strolling through Rome’s deserted pre-dawn streets, passing by former haunts and revisiting old friends; and replaying liaisons that no long satisfy.  What’s it all about, Jep? 

Owing to masterful  writing, directing, acting, and luscious photography, Jep’s  quest to make sense of, or, at least, find meaning in his life, must inevitably resonate with the voyeurs who’ve plunked down $10 or more to be a part of this phantasmagoria for  142 minutes.

“The Great Beauty” is a surreal, visually rich feast that should satiate most, if not all, discriminating filmgoers over the age of twelve.
Beth Rubin is a longtime Annapolis writer-author and film enthusiast who writes frequently about the arts.  www.bethrubinauthor.com

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