“Dazzlingly ambitious, beautifully filmed, and thoroughly enthralling, The Great Beauty offers virtuoso filmmaking from writer/director Paolo Sorrentino.” Rotten Tomatoes.
This film explores a society in decay, centering in the life of the socialite in XXI century Rome. Sorrentino takes the viewers through a visual bath of eccentricities and pleasures, showing the life of a journalist at the age of 65, who reflects upon the emptiness and superficiality of his life. The tittle ‘The Great Beauty’ is the struggle for something valuable, something far deeper than aesthetics and superficiality, something deeply profound that defines life when understood. This provokes an implicit dramatic development that requires a sensible and active viewer to fully comprehended and understand the protagonist’s thoughts and actions, which differ from the thoughts of society. Jep Gambardella -the main character- has the spiritual ability to find beauty in simple things, from the roof at his bedroom on which he sees the sea, to the beauty he finds in a spiritual relation with an erotic dancer. The film is charged with surrealism which allows the unconscious to express itself by delightful and illogical scenes precisely captured by the camera. A giraffe in roman ruins being part of a magic trick. A tourist dying because of the beauty of Rome. A symbolical death of an existential Jesus. And finally a cardinal more focused on culinary arts than religion, expressing the complexity of life in a society that is in decay, and also the current state of the catholic lie. The photography in this movie portrays the beauty of ancient and modern Rome, being a key complement to the tittle and producing a feast to the eyes. Which is the extended to the ears by music specially selected, reinforcing the mood and the emotions transmitted to through the movie, giving another dimension to the art spectrum that the movie is alluding.
XXI Century 