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.
.
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).
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