The Great Beauty (2013)
(film 142 minutes)

Directed by: Paolo Sorrentino
Language: Italian

Rating: 3/10 | Yaser Tohidi
September 9, 2019

A writer in his mid-sixties, Jep Gambardella, is attracted by faint beautiful scenes around him and reflects on his life and others’. He stopped writing decades ago after his masterpiece and is now working as a journalist. He is, as he puts it, the king of high societies. It has been long like this and now that he is older, he wants to change it. He starts seeing the absurdity of the people around him though he still goes on appreciating the smallest sources of inspiration. But he is not satisfied and looks for the great beauty while every flashes of beauty hides under circumstances. He and his life are full of contradictions.
The Great Beauty depicts a touristic view of Rome. It tries to give it a higher artistic tune by showing surrealist pictures like when the writer is faced with a giraffe or when the flamingos appear in his balcony. But these scenes don’t play a role in scenario because the main story line is not strong and is not followed. There are many sequences which have no relevance to the previous one.
The Great Beauty is experiencing new editing and shooting techniques. The insist on these experiences and taking good shots, music video type of photography though, affects the story of the movie and the movie goes out of rhythm many times. As an example, when Jep hears that his first love is dead while she always loved him, he is touched, and this incident is given more effect with the nice sequence in which a lost girl calls him “nobody”. But the next sequence is irrelevant to this incident and later this incidence is forgotten. This comes back when he recounts his first love to Ramona, the stripper who is not looking for beauty in life. Ramona reminds him of his first love because she was also a pessimist. We find this when she shows her breast instead of kissing him for the first time. But again, this is ignored in coming sequences. And that is why The Great Beauty lacks a story line. It’s a 2 hours video clip of a retired writer seeing the beauties offered in Rome. The ending when he decides to write again seems extra. What is he writing about? We don’t know. Maybe about his first love. But that doesn’t matter because his first love is insubstantial in the scenario anyways. The Great Beauty depicts the life of high society in art in Rome. Nothing more! 

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