The Great Beauty

In The Great Beauty writer/director Paolo Sorrentino shows he can unleash not just Fellini’s   generosity of imagination but his courage to be declared self-indulgent. The cornucopia of impressionist scenes may seem incoherent but it offers several unifying themes.

Certainly one is reviving Fellini’s ghost himself, specifically offering a La Dolce Vita for our times. As Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories replayed Fellini’s 8 1/2. The wasted, creatively constipated writer’s cruise through decadent Rome is the obvious structural parallel. Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) is a seriously diminished — in face, ethic, style — Marcello Mastroianni. Jep even plans to show his new woman Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli) a new sea monster (from Fellini’s climax). When Ramona dies, perhaps by suicide, no young innocent remains. The homonymous playwright Romano (Carlo Verdone) who feels betrayed by Rome parallels Fellini’s intellectual who kills himself feeling betrayed by life. On this line Sorrentino’s point is that Western Civilization has not heeded Fellini’s diagnosis of terminal anomie and cultural decadence but joyously nourishes it.

In addition I’d suggest the film deals with the difference between self-awareness and self-knowledge. Sorrentino’s vast cast personify theatrical behaviour, that is the projection of a self that is not one’s own. It represents the illusion of being. The quest for the self behind the image is the point of the installation in a rural ruin of photographs representing each day in the artist's life.

The performance artist Talia Concept (Anita Kravos) and the little girl whose action paintings sell for millions show visual art turned into theatre. Where Talia bashes her head into a stone wall the little girl’s coerced art is clearly a torture for her.

The gentleman entrusted with the keys to all the rich private spaces in Rome is another theatrical, turning the life rooms into spectacles for the privileged night tours. The nobles rented for a party act as if they were the family’s traditional enemies; after, at “home,” the wife plays the tour tape that tells her girlhood story. Now she’s a tourist in her own life.

That is also Jep when he continually recalls his first love, who died loving him, not her “good companion” husband. Jep is trying to recover the lover, the self, he might have been. He wants to read her diary, the script she lived inside, but her husband threw it away, as Jep has tossed any revelations he might have recorded since his sole publication.

Everyone dances here, which means throwing themselves into a frantic activity instead of stopping to think, discover and realize their self. Romano does the latter when he rents a theatre and moves through several ideas of impersonal theatre before doing a public expression of himself. The applause — like his exploiting dream-woman’s usual abandonment — still doesn’t satisfy him so he throws in his lifelong dream of a Roman triumph and goes back to his home town. 

As the saintly 104-year old nun explains, she eats only roots because “Roots are important.” Sorrentino’s society is a mass of deracinated characters whose total dedication to the party life successfully evades facing and fulfilling themselves. Being closest to the earth, the dwarf who’s a journal editor seems to be the only partier actually working for a living. Of course that level of “writing,” journalism, is like the writings of the Fellini hero and like the fashionably shallow plethora of interviews here, a serious compromise of the art.

That 2-toothed nun does her own theatre, sitting or standing in feeble stiffness to flatter her adorers, then climbing the giant staircase on her 104-year-old knees. Her custodian imputes to her a more genuine life — serving, washing, feeding the poor 22 hours a day — that is simply unsupported by the theatre we see her perform. But even that saintly self-abnegating service is only another form of theatre, which enables her to find in religious charity an excuse not to examine herself. This religion is an abdication of self. In contrast, the cardinal bound for popehood is obsessed with a different form of self-indulgent appetite, his mania for cooking and for generously sharing his recipes instead of spirituality. Of course, his recipes and robe get him invited to all the finer parties. 

We watch Jep’s responses as he watches all that theatre, frenzied pretence where the examined life should be. The success of his one novel has won him what he wanted, the power to get to the best parties — and to spoil them. Only a couple of times here does he rise to spoil them, by doing what a writer should do, expose the skeleton beneath the apparently fine flesh. He anatomizes the woman who vainly claims to make sacrifices as a woman, writer and mom. He reveals the cardinal’s vacuity. Both those criticisms would in a work of fiction be constructive. In real life they are, respectively, cruel and ineffectual. 
     But for the most part, though Jep sees the emptiness in the gauds around him, instead of withdrawing to save himself and to pursue his writer’s mission he — joins the dance. His face shows he knows but he still gets on the train.

He early rationalizes that willing suspension of awareness: “We're all on the brink of despair, all we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little... Don't you agree?” 

What made young Jeb a potential writer was his early sensitivity to the social reality:
           “To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: ‘Pussy.’. Whereas I answered ‘The smell of old people's houses.’ The question was ‘What do you really like the most in life?’ I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.” 
But in joining the mindless dance he has sold out his self. “Old people’s houses” also means mortality, the smell of the decaying body, the soul’s housing. He reveals a stifling narrowness, not a breadth, when he explains “I'm not a misogynist, I'm a misanthrope.”

At film end Jep seems to have worked through his block to be able to write again:

“This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah... It's all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise, silence and sentiment, emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world, blah, blah, blah... Beyond there is what lies beyond. And I don't deal with what lies beyond. Therefore... let this novel begin. After all... it's just a trick. Yes, it's just a trick.”

But wait. What kind of writer settles for a chorus of “Blah, blah, blah?” One who holds off engaging, probing, analyzing, defining. That is what our Jep has been consistently doing all along.  To him now writing is not the special vision and apprehension it originally was, but a simple “trick” — like making a giraffe disappear. The film does not represent his growth but his paralysis. His closing resolve is no more than his occasional truth-telling has been — the promise of a self-realization he lacks the will to pursue. Against the background of eternal Rome and its amassed riches of human achievement, the self-destroyers carry on their carrion theatre, pretending to liveliness, faking life, dying well before they’re dead.