The Great Beauty

As the 2014 Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Language Film, The Great Beauty certainly holds up to its title. Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, the film aptly depicts a world filled with self-indulgent aristocrats who are on the fruitless search for something greater, be it love, happiness or otherwise. The Great Beauty never hesitates in showing the darker side of an aging empire, and how the modern Roman struggles to find meaning in today’s unforgiving world.

The Great Beauty opens with an extravagant, explosive party filled with overzealous, high-energy dancing. As Sorrentino’s swooping camera swiftly navigates its way through the wild crowd, the relentless techno beat and the explosive physicality mimics a frenzied rush towards oblivion. The party guests are bored, excited savages in Sorrentino’s vision of a waning Italian city. It is later revealed, with a slow-motion zoom on to a well-dressed, aged man, that the party is held by Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a wealthy bon vivant.

The Great Beauty’s meandering plot revolves around Jep journeying through the high life in Rome. It is an obvious nod to Fellini and even more so, The Great Beauty is plainly a modern remake of La Dolce Vita. Like the 1960 Fellini classic, The Great Beauty features a decaying Rome, filled with inhabitants who wallow in their own superficial, luxurious lifestyles and frequent debauchery. It consists of similar themes that Fellini dealt with — decadence, religion, morality and the search for a meaningful way of life.

Arguably, The Great Beauty attempts to step out of Fellini’s shadow by exploring an additional thematic concern — the creative process. As a one-time successful novelist, Jep appears to possess a jaded attitude towards contemporary art. He meets a performance artist, Talia Concept, whose act consists of head-butting walls. Later in an interview, she speaks in third person and admits to living on ‘vibrations, extra-sensory ones’. In one party, a young child angrily throws buckets of paint on a large canvas to produce something similar to a Jackson Pollock piece. As a seemingly uninterested audience watches on, Jep’s date worriedly comments, ‘That girl was crying.’ He replies, ‘Nonsense! That girl earns millions!’ Modern Roman art appears to be infiltrated by a certain superficiality. The artistic endeavour is now misguided by the path to monetary gains and seemingly intellectual pursuits. The creative pursuit has fallen to the corruptive powers of Rome, and even with money and time to spare, Jep could not care less.

When Jep receives news regarding the death of his first love, he is visibly moved and troubled by this loss. He tries to look for something to fill this void, but his unspecified yearning for something greater is undoubtedly futile. His rich, middle-aged friends are in a similar position, squandering money and revelling in parties, botox appointments and various lovers. The youth offer no refuge or solution either: Andrea, the mentally ill son of one of Jep’s friends, quotes Proust and appears glum about the idea of death looming. Religion, too, is more of a side attraction to Jep and his friends. There appears to be no bright future in a hopeless, glittery city, yet Sorrentino’s immaculate styling enthrals us further into Jep’s dilapidated Rome.

‘It’s just a trick,’ Arturo the magician explains to Jep when showing him a vanishing act. Certainly, perhaps the search for meaning in a morally repulsive Rome is just a meaningless ploy to entice its inhabitants.The ability to obtain something greater, to vanish, is simply an illusion, which Jep fails to grasp. Like any great trick, The Great Beauty is supremely captivating and visually impressive, while leaving us wondering over its spectacular likeness to Rome and reality.