LA GRANDE BELLEZZA -- Roma o morte

Speranza

The Glory of Rome is the Sweetness of Life.

The first time you see Jep Gambardella, the Roman sensualist magnificently, poetically adrift in “La grande bellezza," he has a cigarette clenched in the centre of his big, bared, ocher-stained teeth.

People are surging all around him, their bodies pulsating to music that has transformed a multitude into an organism that beats like a heart.

As Gambardella sways amid this delirium, he smiles with welcoming arms and lidded eyes, an attitude that brings to mind one of those marble saints scattered around Rome forever locked in rapture.

And then Gambardella joins the dance, surrendering to a throng that, in absorbing him, turns an orgiastic reverie into something like a religious communion.

A deliriously alive movie, “La grande bellezza ” is the story of Roma.

It was directed by Paolo Sorrentino.

Sorrentino takes on Roma's past and how it weighs on the present and future.

Set in Rome, that immortal city of ancients and tourists, the film follows Gambardella, a sybarite played with a veneer of wit and fathomless soul by Antonio Servillo, who dances into the story while celebrating his 65th birthday.

Forty years earlier, Gambardella’s only novel, “L'apparato umano" was hailed as a masterpiece, but that was many years and glasses of Campari ago.

These days, Gambardella works (if barely) as a journalist and lives in a terraced apartment overlooking the Colosseum.

Gambardella was, he says during his party, “destined for sensibility.”

So, too, was Sorrentino, who in “The Great Beauty” has created a wildly inventive and sometimes thrilling ode to sensibility and to some of its linguistic cousins, like sensation, sensitivity and sentiment.

Structured as a series of loosely connected episodes, the peripatetic story comes into focus soon after Gambardella’s birthday, when he learns that his first love, an enigmatic blonde, Emilia di Curtis, who smiles at him in his memories of a seaside idyll, has died.

Emilia's husband breaks the bad news to Gambardella, and together they weep, an emotional torrent which — in an elegiac illustration of Sorrentino’s associative method — initially evokes Gambardella’s memories of the dead woman, whom he watches while swimming, and then comes to a watery culmination with the men embracing in a hard rain.

Elisa’s death (which is symbolically yoked to 1968 and its revolutionary promise) hovers over the story and over Gambardella as he wanders Rome, dines with friends and meditates on his life in voice-overs that sound like confessions.

Elegantly attired, Gambardella's gray hair swept back and curling at his neck, a handkerchief fountaining out of his jacket pocket, Jep is the very picture of the flâneur, the urban stroller and spectator immortalized by Carlo Baudelaire and in whom, Walter Benjamin wrote, “the joy of watching is triumphant.”

What the flâneur watches is modern life, and other people.

“The crowd is the veil,” Benjamin wrote, “through which Roma beckons, to the flâneur as phantasmagoria — now a landscape, now a room.”

Benjamin wondered why the flâneur, born in Paris, did not spring from the glorious archaeological sprawl that is Rome.

“But perhaps in Roma even dreaming is forced to move along streets that are too well-paved.”

He suggested that for a flâneur, Roma’s “great reminiscences, the historical frissons” are so much junk better left to the grand tourists.

The grand tourist, that familiar figure of contempt, plays a crucial role in “La Grande Bellezza” which opens with a prologue set in The Janiculum, a hill west of the Tiber.

There, scattered amid busts of heroes of the Risorgimento, the 19th-century movement for Italian unification, a smattering of Italians mill about while a group of Japanese grand tourists take in the sights — a view, Roma, a people, a history — that, Sorrentino suggests, the native Romans no longer necessarily see.

To an extent, “La Grande Bellezza” is about Gambardella's wakening to a world that, as he strolls around Roma— his ears tuned in to children’s laughter, his eyes fixed on a courtyard scene — has become charming atmospheric noise.

As he walks along the Tevere early one morning, he explains in voice-over that when he arrived in Rome from NAPOLI at 26, he decided that he wanted to become “the king of the high life.”

But he didn’t just want to go to parties, he continues, he wanted to have “the power to make them a failure.”

It’s a little comment, seemingly trivial and yet also revealing because as Gambardella began partying in Rome in the 1970s, Roma experienced what became known as the Years of Lead, a time of political violence and the Red Brigades.

Gambardella’s awakening has its moments of violence and melancholy.

Death hangs over “La grande bellezza” from the statue of Garibaldi inscribed with the words “Roma o Morte” to the funeral where Jep tearfully hoists a coffin.

Mostly, though, there is beauty reborn as Sorrentino’s cameras fly through Roma, knocking the dust off the city’s monuments and Gambardella alike.

At one point, during one of his nightly salons, Jep casually tells his friends that “the best people in Rome are the tourists.”

It sounds like a glib aside.

Yet as he emerges from the long wandering that has defined him — a drift that Sorrentino suggests that has been shared by one and all — Jep opens up to awe, affirming what all visitors know: we are only passing through, so we had better make the most of our visit.
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Directed by Paolo Sorrentino; written by Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello.

Director of photography, Luca Bigazzi; edited by Cristiano Travaglioli.

Music by Lele Marchitelli.

Produced by Nicola Giuliano and Francesca Cima; released by Janus Films.

WITH:

Antonio Servillo (Jep Gambardella)

Carlo Verdone (Romano)

Sabrina Ferilli (Ramona)

Carlo Buccirosso (Lello Cava)

Iaia Forte (Trumeau)

Pamela Villoresi (Viola)

Galatea Ranzi (Stefania)

Massimo De Francovich (Egidio)

Roberto Herlitzka (Cardinal Bellucci)

Isabella Ferrari (Orietta).