ROMA: LA GRANDE BELLEZZA

Speranza

Rome is the Eternal City.

But it is also one of the great cities of cinema, which means continuous change and flow.

The Great Beauty, the new film from Paolo Sorrentino, plunges headlong into the current.

All you can do is plunge in there with it and clamber out two and a half hours later, sopping wet, gulping the air and perhaps having lost a shoe.

Sorrentino’s picture sets out to explain Rome today, as city, mindset and belief system.

That’s a fantastically ambitious project, but other Italian film-makers have been spurred to action in the past by similarly fantastic ambitions, and thank goodness they were: we have Rome, Open City and La Dolce Vita to show for it.

The Great Beauty positions itself as a direct successor to those two unimpeachable masterpieces. Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini’s films immortalised the Italian capital during two eras so extraordinary we need cinema to make full sense of them.

Rossellini covered the Nazi occupation of 1944; Fellini the seductive, empty hedonism of the years that followed.

Sorrentino's plan is to do the same for the Berlusconi era.

"La grande bellezza" is a carnival of loosely connected vignettes, set at all-night parties, high-society jamborees and shadowy religious congresses.

The revellers are old but their faces are tight, drawn back by plastic surgery, and Sorrentino’s camera glides around them like the ghost at the feast.

The eye of this storm is Jep Gambardella, a playboy of pensionable age who made his fortune as a journalist and his reputation with a novel called "The Human Apparatus", which he wrote in his early twenties – either “a masterpiece of Italian literature” or “a narrow-minded, frivolous book, as pretentious as its title” depending on whom he talks to.

One spiteful former lover, in a fit of unconscionable cruelty, calls it "a novelette”.
 
Jep is played by Sorrentino’s regular collaborator Toni Servillo, and his walnut-wrinkled face, inquisitive as a meerkat’s, is there smiling enigmatically in almost every frame.

We are of course supposed to recall Marcello Mastroianni’s similar inky-fingered gadabout in the Fellini film.

Sorrentino even gives Jep a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles to help hammer home the point.

Subtlety, as you may have already gathered, is NOT "The Great Beauty"’s strong suit.

When the film begins, Jep is celebrating his 65th birthday.

After a prelude so eccentric it makes you want to cheer – a Japanese tourist eagerly takes photographs of the Roman sky-line before collapsing on the cobbles, having apparently overdosed on the sheer splendour of the place.

We cut to Jep’s pent-house suite, opposite the Coliseum, where a social gathering is taking place on the roof terrace.

I say gathering.

This little function would make one of Caligula’s livelier soirées look like a tea dance, and Sorrentino uses it to deafen us with images and blind us with music.

The next day, Jep goes to bed and stares up at the ceiling.

It starts to ripple and swell like a wide, blue ocean, as well it might after the night before.

From here, past intermingles with present, and reality with memories and perhaps also dreams.

Jep thinks back on his life, which has also been the life of Roma, and realises he has spent most of it searching on the roof tops and in the gutters for what he calls la grande bellezza – "the great beauty".

What he actually finds is gangsterism, triviality, hypocrisy and decadence.

We meet a well-respected cardinal, hotly tipped to be the next Pope, who has nothing to share but cookery tips.

In his defence, they sounded pretty good, and I did scribble down his advice on how best to pan-fry duck.

Later, a priest and a nun walk into a haute cuisine palace and order a bottle of vintage Cristal champagne.

The sacred and profane smash into one another everywhere, as if Sorrentino is working some kind of metaphysical Large Hadron Collider.

The soundtrack features some of the most stirring devotional music ever composed:

Tavener’s The Lamb
Martynov’s Beatitudes; and also We No Speak Americano, as heard in The Inbetweeners Movie.
Can The Great Beauty really stand alongside Rome, Open City and La Dolce Vita?

Check back in half a century.

Until then, all that matters is that it might, and theoretically could.

It certainly soars above Sorrentino’s earlier work, a shimmering coup de cinema to make your heart burst, your mind swim and your soul roar.

When the credits began to roll at the press screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May, some critics rose to their feet and just stared dumbly at the screen.

I’m happy to admit I was among them.