May returns and Rome defrosts, warms up. It turns on. Coloring with ocher and green. The light, which arrives from the west, going as far as the east, beyond the now gentrified villages, cuts the landscape horizontally, as if it were a dazzling invisible slab. A mystical, unique, millenary light. The same light translated by Luca Bigazzi into what, ten years after its triumphant release, is still one of the high points (and unattainable?) of Italian cinema. Because, more than the Oscar, more than the “sensitivity”, more than a sly Via Veneto, vicious and nocturnal, The great beauty Of Paolo Sorrentino sums up the eternity of Rome, suspended and motionless as the pink-tinged Tiber is motionless, at dawn, while the seagulls begin to sing an incessant and comfortable dirge.
The same seagulls chosen by Sorrentino for that masterly closing, observing them directly from the Tiber, and choosing the light notes of The Beatitudes by Vladimir Martynov, played by the Kronos Quartet, to cradle the images of Rome seen from below, glimpsing the friezes, the fronds of the trees, the tourists looking out from Ponte Sisto. An ending that will ideally be the beginning, the rediscovered awareness of a lyrical and decadent, emotional and modern man. Camouflaged in his tailored suits (the costumes are by Daniela Ciancio), gaudy and ironed, to camouflage the regrets that break the heart. Jep Gambardella, between Charles Baudelaire, Flaubert and Marcel Proust. Jep Gambardella, from Naples to Rome, “the King of Mundanes” who wanted to have the power to derail parties.
Opulence and Romanity
In short, Roman egocentrism, deluded romanticism, opulence at the service of poetry: Tony Servillo dresses by Jep Gambardella and, thanks to Sorrentino’s screenplay, written together with Umberto Contarello, it somehow becomes the masterpiece within the masterpiece, dazzling in its frank, inimitable and baroque philosophy. “A human apparatus” and a cinematographic apparatus, the overlap between the story and the arrogant reality; one of the best characters of Italian cinema, like Marcello Rubini de The sweet life (from which Sorrentino was inspired for the frame, marking instead Half past eight for artistic spirituality) or Bruno Cortona de Overtaking. Simply, and revised after ten years, The great beauty it is truly a once-in-a-lifetime film. Piece by piece, character by character.
A milestone, the definitive maturation of Paolo Sorrentino, between the ecstasy and the aesthetics of that narration emphasized precisely by the images, and never debased by the lyricism of his directorial meter. Powerful cinema, very powerful. Aestheticisation as a function of writing, which has always been the author’s focal point, erroneously mistaken for self-complacency, and unreadable by that short-sighted audience (and critics) in the face of marvel. Further up, touching on intellectual perfection, utopian in the human journey of a man in love, and painful in his most sensitive feelings. Like Rome, like the weather that doesn’t seem to scratch it. If anything, making it even more precious, delicate in its restless and flashy ecosystem, yet capable of giving flashes of painful beauty.
Paolo Sorrentino: “The comparison with Fellini flatters me, but it’s wrong”
“Just a Trick”
So, Sorrentino’s work is not just a tribute to the Capital, it becomes its transmigration: forgetting all the clamor, forgetting theOscar for best foreign filmforgetting the flamingos and forgetting the terraces and the most beautiful trains that “they’re not going anywhere”review today The great beauty after walking in the center of Rome, or vice versa. You will smell the immortal smell, you will raise your eyes towards the seagulls, which dance uncoordinated, leaning on the marble heads of saints and poets. You will try to touch the light, which creeps between the grungy walls. The identical light that seeks Jep, closing his eyes because so much “it’s just a trick”. You will feel the weight of melancholy, gripped by a time that slips away and runs, leaving less and less space for the future. In this case the figure of Carlo Verdone, deluded and disillusioned, is the metaphor of a more contemporary, perhaps less cynical Rome: what could be better tomorrow, if all this already exists today. “What do you have against nostalgia, eh? It’s the only entertainment left for those who are wary of the future, the only one”he will say, before Sorrentino symbolically makes him leave the scene.
After all, The Great Beauty is a universal film. Again: universal like Roma. Complex city and fulcrum of narratives that cross, between present and past. The same overlap that Sorrentino will outline keeping in mind the appearance and the substance, dressing the empty masks of a society obsessed with art “civil vocation”. The same consummate vocation though “in the university toilets”, and then crumbled by sacrificing it in the name of ephemeral and residual pleasure. Like filmic pleasure, in this case sensorial: “Pleasure no longer arises from the total satisfaction of the person but can satisfy the eyes and hearing in a split way. An example? Many have seen it twice _The great beauty and I think I know why: once they saw it and once they heard it”_, the screenwriter Umberto Contarello would say, explaining the bifurcation stipulated by Sorrentino.
It was the hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino: “My only tutelary deity for this film was Massimo Troisi”
So if every tilt gives different ripples, so does cinema. Malleable art, impervious to time. Time is the protagonist of the film, time is the enemy (or ally?) of beauty. The time that afflicts and haunts Jep, exaggerated and pindaric, clinging to a blurry memory of a face he can’t let go. What’s left for him? What Paolo Sorrentino makes “haggard and inconstant beauty”. Because under the noise and chatter there is no other but “silence and feeling, emotion and fear”. Before ending up beyond elsewhere, beyond death. In the perennial shadow of a festively made-up Rome.
