Film Review | The Great Beauty

Well, it took you guys long enough.

I have very little faith in our local film distributors, much less in the way cinemas deal with non-Hollywood productions... which is to say, they don’t deal with or in them at all – presumably bringing in foreign and indie films into their screens just to die a quick and easy death, pulling anything that isn’t a ‘tent-pole’ would-be blockbuster a week or so following its release (and this includes the work of generally lucrative luminaries like Pedro Almodovar).

Of course, their argument is, simply, ‘bums on seats’. No bums on seats, no films on screens. But if the audience isn’t even given a chance to watch the films in the first place, how can you expect to make money off them? Seriously, I know of only one class of human being who would specifically target a particular week – or even a particular day – in which to watch a film: and that’s us, film critics. Normal people with normal, nine-to-five jobs and families will visit the cinema whenever is convenient. And if they’re busy during the only given week an off-the-beaten-track film is showing, well…

You want proof? I’ll give you proof.

Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), a international box office hit and an Oscar winner, has only just made its way into our cinemas – a full year after its release. It would be fair to assume that any debate about the film deserving its accolades has been exhausted by now, even locally. Let’s not forget that we live in age where multimedia entertainment is easy to acquire through pirate means, and with a film that’s in such high demand already…

But we’re here now, right? Let’s recap what this whole thing is about.

Sorrentino’s film employs his muse Toni Servillo as Jep Gambardella, a 65-year-old journalist specialising in Rome’s cultural scene. Having drifted through the city’s bohemian and high-society circles, Jep – single and professionally aimless – is well aware that his life is approaching its twilight years, and that he may not have all that much to show for it.

That is, until, a shock from the past jolts him out of his reverie – though it must be said, only slightly – which triggers off poignant memories of the past. Rifling through vapid social encounters with his many acquaintances, Jep is forced to remember that once, life was more than just thumping bunga-bunga parties and sharp, sarcastic barbs over cocktails.

Sorrentino certainly does a good enough job of capturing the enduring allure of The Eternal City (hey, it’s called The Eternal City for a reason, I guess); appropriately enough, the film opens with a roving shot of tourists clicking away with their cameras, only to discover that a corpse has soured their idyllic day of sightseeing.

This too-neat encapsulation of the film’s themes characterises Sorrentino’s unfortunately maimed approach to his subject matter this time around. As filmmaker he has proven himself to be sensitive to political realities – see his searing dissection of Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008) – while also being a deft hand at themes of loneliness and isolation – see The Consequences of Love (2004).

So it’s slightly disappointing to see just how lax La Grande Bellezza really is. The beautiful images are left to play out like a merry-go-round, and while they’re pleasing in and of themselves, you get the sense that Sorrentino was going for something more than just surface allure, but whatever depths he intended to plumb, they remain frustratingly out of reach.

Perhaps there’s something to be said for a film about the hollowness of contemporary art and culture – specifically located and illustrated by Rome – that turns out to be hollow in and of itself, by necessity: that the only way to comment on superficiality is to confront the viewer with something equally superficial and let them click the final piece of the puzzle into place by themselves.

This is, after all, how Oliver Stone tackled the theme of media violence in his blistering Natural Born Killers (1994) and more recently, how Martin Scorcese successfully depicted the Wall Street life as a grotesque nightmare of greed in The Wolf of Wall Street.

But Sorrentino stops short of this kind of commitment to his vision, maiming his film almost fatally. Even if you forget that his basic artistic programme here has a clear precedent in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita – it takes a particularly brazen soul to sidle up to such a classic – the foundation here is a tacked-on wistful romance that’s makes for a supremely unsatisfying counterbalance to the roll-call of decadent behaviour he seemingly turns to as a distraction.

In the end, what we end up witnessing is an attractive trifle with some possibly enduring witty asides, but which doesn’t really stand on its own as a fully-formed artistic project.

While it may draw its – substantial and glittering – energy from The Eternal City, Sorrentino’s film runs the risk of being easily forgotten: as ephemeral as the shrill and shallow lives it’s littered with.