La Grande Bellezza – or The Great Beauty in English – is not your conventional movie with set plot twists. It starts with many characters that appear on screen just once and are in no way related to the story. It’s summer time. A woman is reading a newspaper. A choir is singing. A tourist guide is doing her routine act for a group of Japanese tourists when one of them wonders off and dies due to a sunstroke. The choir keeps on singing.
Cut to a party where people are singing, dancing and yelling. The first thing that hits you is the change of tempo, from haunting choir music to hip-swinging Italian pop. This seems to be one of the many themes of writer/director Paolo Sorrentino – to juxtapose classic art with the so called modern. The camera movement in the first ten minutes is reminiscent of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique used in literature, especially in Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. After about 10 minutes of following camera that goes around randomly, we finally zoom in on the protagonist, Jep Gambardella (Tony Servillo) who is celebrating his 65th birthday.
What makes a great piece of art? One criterion is that you can view the work along many different axes. That’s what I am going to do here. In doing so, I will also be missing out on some point of views. For instance, the movie makes several deep comments on the Catholic influences in Italy. In fact, one of the main characters of the movie is Sister Maria. Unfortunately, to understand these fully, you must understand the Italian culture and society on a much deeper level. Ditto with the political comments in the film.
One of the interesting axes is Jep Gambardella himself. Jep is a character with many fascinating layers. He is one-hit wonder writer whose first book was a massive success and won the prestigious Premio Bancarella Prize. One is reminded here of Harper Lee and To Kill A Mockingbird. He has not written another book since then. Why? That is one of the many questions that the movie tries to answer. As he confesses later in the movie, one of Jep’s ambitions was to be the king of high society in Rome. At 65, he feels that he has succeeded. A serial womaniser, Jep does not have any family. He always puts on a mask while dealing with most of the people he meets. Exceptions are a close friend, his editor, his housekeeper or a rare moment of honesty with Sister Maria. He also breaks down twice in the movie. Both these moments are quite interesting.
First one is at a funeral of a young man who committed suicide. Before going to the funeral, Jep lectures his girlfriend Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli) in detail about the funeral etiquette in high society. Never cry, he says. That will take away the spotlight from the family. He then breaks down in tears as he is carrying the casket of the unfortunate boy. At first, Ramona thinks it’s an act but realizes later that it’s not.
Second instance is also remarkable. There is a man whose father took his picture every day since he was boy. After his father passed away, the man continued the tradition. Now he has a picture of himself on every day of most of his life and he has put these images on a wall to exhibit. Looking at these images, Jep breaks down again, this time looking at snapshots of life as it grows.
Ramona vanishes in the middle of the movie. We later learn that she had an incurable disease. Death seems to be one of the major themes of the movie. Makes sense when the protagonist is 65 years old, although he is not your typical grandpa. Quite the opposite, in fact. He is shrewd and suave and is able to glide smoothly through the many facades of high society (mondanita in Italian.)
The Great Beauty alternates between dream and reality, the real and the surreal. Jep likes to lie on his bed and stare at the ceiling. When he does that, the ceiling transforms into blue sea. Then we enter the dream world. A frantic woman is searching for her daughter. The little one is standing in a room with a open grid overhead. As Jep passes he looks down. The girl asks him, “Who are you?” “I..I..” Jep stammers. “You are nobody.” A dreamy representation of the existential demons that Jep is wrestling with in his twilight years.
Director Paolo Sorrentino comes down heavily on the so called performance art. In the beginning of the movie, there is nude woman – with a communist sign decorated tactfully in her red pubic hair – who runs headlong into a wall. A trick with foam rubber, as Jep and his editor later reveal. “Amateur dramatics is not dead yet”, is Jep’s wry comment.
One by one, Sorrentino reveals the lies that surround us. An aspiring novelist and an actor talking about their future projects, namedropping Shakespeare and Proust for good measure. A husband who was heartbroken after his wife’s death but found a new girlfriend the very next week. “What lovely people you are!” is Jep’s comment with his mask full on. A middle aged woman, who posts her selfies on Facebook and when she starts getting the likes, mistakes her work for art. “I am sure you are nude in some of them,” Jep observes. He is right. Or the Count and the Countess, their empire long gone, who now offer themselves on rent for high society dinners where seats need filing and their titles sound good in introductions.
Jep is like a water drop on a lotus leaf through all this. He immerses himself fully in all these falsities, sometimes participating actively and yet managing to remain aloof. This is why his encounter with the Sister Maria is interesting. Sister Maria is very, very old, all the wrinkles on her face very visible and photogenic, like the old woman in Satyajit Ray’s Panther Panchali. She has read Jep’s novel, The Human Apparatus and loved it.
After a dinner hosted in honour of Sister Maria at Jep’s house, they retire to the terrace that overlooks the Colosseum. It’s night and the balcony is filled with beautiful swans who are resting before migrating west.
“Why didn’t you write another book?”, Sister asks.
Jep looks at the swans, exhales and says, “I was searching for the Great Beauty but I could not find it.” Sounds much better in Italian,
Cercavo la grande bellezza, ma non l’ho trovata.
Paolo Sorrentino has certainly found the great beauty in this masterpiece. And he keeps on finding it even after the movie is over. As the credits start rolling, we are taken on a boat ride down the Tiber river in Rome. It’s evening. People lounging on river bank, on bridges, birds flying, the typical Italian transport buses, nuns posing for a photograph and so on. And in the background Kronos Quartet is playing The Beatitudes. It’s a dreamy evening boat ride, at once evoking haunting and indescribable emotions.
It’s what The Great Beauty is all about.
