The ghost of Federico Fellini hovers wickedly over The Great Beauty, a fantastic journey around contemporary Rome and a riot of lush imagery juggling past and present, sacred and profane, gorgeous and grotesque.
Opulence is both the movie’s style and its subject — but then “wasting things is something that I like [to do],” said director Paolo Sorrentino in a recent interview with Film Comment. Those who like their narratives linear may feel unsettled, though, by the film’s jumble of wondrous but seemingly unrelated sights, which veer from beautiful women to gargoyles, from nunneries to orgiastic rooftop parties.
A tourist drops dead; the camera swoops and swerves onto a vanishing giraffe and a flock of flamingos — which may be real, or the fevered imaginative constructs of a man rambling around his adopted city trying to parse both his life and the incoherent mashup of our times. The score likewise veers from propulsive pop to lyrical ancient ballads and choral music.
The movie opens on a rooftop patio, where urbane but jaded journalist Jep Gambardella seems to be enjoying the depraved revelry of his birthday party. Toni Servillo, the actor playing him, dazzled viewers in Sorrentino’s 2008 Il Divo as a thinly disguised version of Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti, an enormously ambiguous and spectral figure; here the actor’s marvelously mobile face, lined and sexy and quizzical, signals a man still curious about the world but weary of a dissolute life he suspects may add up to nothing.