If you know Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” you’ll be unable to watch “The Great Beauty” without thinking about it. This gorgeous Italian movie, like its predecessor, balances pungent satire and a more melancholy mood in portraying the dissolute world of the upper crust in contemporary Rome.
It’s the story of Jep Gambardella (an outstanding Toni Servillo, of 2008’s “Il Divo”), who wrote a masterpiece of a novel in his youth but has been unable to repeat the success. He’s become a journalist and bon vivant, living in an incredible apartment overlooking the Colosseum. He’s popular in his circle but jaded, and, having just turned 65, is starting to look at the big picture.
When news arrives of an old girlfriend’s death, he continues to make the rounds of high-end gatherings and nightspots in the Eternal City, but in a “what’s it all mean” frame of mind. He informs us that once he wanted to be the king of Rome’s extravagant night world. But he no longer wholly buys into his cynicism, if he ever did.
There’s isn’t much of a plot, just a running account of what Jep sees and says during his sometimes surreal urban wanderings. In one of the film’s most unsettling scenes, we see a young girl, whose father says has “made millions,” unhappily creating avant-garde paintings in front of an audience. Then there’s Jep’s editor, an attractive blue-haired dwarf who offers him good advice. He also encounters a saintly nun, aged 103, who dines only on roots.
It’s an extraordinary portrait of a great city where the crushing weight of history seems to bring out the worst in many. But the film also has a bit of sympathy for its world-weary sybarites, and a goodly amount for Jep, a preening dandy who, by the film’s end, has glimpsed something essential.
