"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 institutions─are 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.
Beth Rubin is a longtime Annapolis writer-author and film enthusiast who writes frequently about the arts. www.bethrubinauthor.com
