The Great Beauty
The opening scenes of The Great Beauty give you a double helping of Rome, with Rome on top: gardens, monuments, cloisters, statuary, and a disco party next to the Colosseum. And all of this drenched in sunshine, or in shining neon. At the party, we’re led right up to Jep Gambardella, who is smiling, smoking, arching his back, and wiggling his fingers to the music. Jep used to be a writer – now he’s addicted to sightseeing, fine clothes, and ‘pussy.’ Toni Servillo, in an extraordinarily good performance, plays Jep as genial, slightly bored, slightly careless, and with the smugness of that rarest of men: the sexually successful 65-year-old.
Sometimes The Great Beauty gets too hungry for a quick visual surprise, or a too easy bit of contrast: a dwarf asleep on a rooftop; or, in an amphitheatre, a sudden, inexplicable giraffe. The movie is much, much better when it stays closer to its characters, and makes them say – to our surprise, or even shock – that they are in great pain. No matter how many times we are told, it can still surprise us, it will never stop surprising us, that the rich, the cultured, the leisurely, can be so, so miserable. Luxe, volupté et misère.
The Great Beauty can be taken as a kind of summary, not just of Rome but all of Italy; a place so stuffed full of old beauty that the only relief it can get from its monuments is a bunga bunga party. But the movie is also after something else: it worships beauty – the closing credits are some of the most slowly gorgeous you will ever see – but it also shows you that everyone, no matter where they are, gets their share of strong, bitter human pain.