Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film is head-scratching, Fellini-esque
“The Great Beauty” is a vibrant party of a film full of life, lights and pulsating sound, and clearly influenced greatly by the films of Federico Fellini. Toni Servillo stars as Jep Gambardella, a renowned author who has not written a novel in years due to lack of inspiration. The film begins with a huge party atop a building in the middle of Rome. There’s no strong plot driving the film but rather a series of vignettes and scenes that push the film along with surrealist energy.
It is a film of great beauty (hence the title), yet it is not afraid to show middle-aged men and women and frankly grotesque, garish people. There is one scene in which characters are planning their future plastic surgery as if it were a manicure. The film is full of humorous and baffling scenes like these; another has a young female aggressively tossing paint onto a large canvas to make abstract art while adults stand around her transfixed. Like the male leads in many of Federico Fellini’s films, Gambardella has an array of female friends, lovers, former lovers and disgruntled women in his life that give him a mixture of pleasure and heartache. His boss is a little person with colored hair and glasses – why not?
Paolo Sorrentino’s giddy, gaudy extravaganza of a film is wonderfully entertaining and a vivid portrait of a creative person. However, it’s extremely abstract, making it hard to understand what the hell it’s all about and grasp its full meaning. The beginning and ending of the film are especially odd. The film opens with a choir singing a haunting hymn around ancient buildings and ruins while tourists view their surroundings. Suddenly, an Asian man with a camera falls down apparently dead of a stroke or heart attack. The last section of the film involves an elderly nun and a flashback to Gambardella’s youth. There are numerous scenes that will leave audience members scratching his or her heads. This is a film that merits or even requires repeated viewings. Who knows what the old nun represents or the woman with the hammer and sickle shaved into her dyed-red public hair who runs head first into a wall.
It will also be more pleasurable to audiences who have seen films by the great Italian director Federico Fellini, especially “La Dolce Vita.” The bawdy humor, female nudity and underpinning of melancholia of Sorrentino’s film align with the sensibilities of Fellini’s masterworks.
“The Great Beauty” is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, and it will probably win. Dive into this wild, confounding film and make up your own interpretation of it.