La Grande Belleza
The ocean ripples on the ceiling, a mother shouts for her lost child, a grown man covers himself in blood, a 40-year-old stripper performs in front of her father, a memory of a first love on a rocky beach.
“La Grande Bellezza,” a 2013 Italian film, welds images of crumbling ruins and their cracks with the demanding modernism of the 21st century. It is riddled with metaphor, humor and sadness. It is a beautiful, sensual movie, a love letter to Rome itself.
Winner of Best Foreign Language Film at the 2013 Oscars, the 142-minute movie was co-written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino.
One scene that particularly stuck with us exhibits the anthropology behind a lavish and fundamentally complex party in Rome, hosted at an opulent apartment next to the Colosseum. As you catch a glimpse of each character passing through the frame, you see all they are. Their story is displayed through the tilt in their head or the curl in their wrist as they click their hip to the repetitive pulse of the beat. The crowd throbs with personality and the cinematic multitude overwhelms in a distinct aesthetic unique to that of Rome in the 21st century.
Each character’s mannerisms and actions are meticulously curated down to the finest detail. Whether in a matter of seconds or full scenes, the viewer is given intricate conflicts, images and an unshakable sense of imperfection, of life.
Every moment speaks volumes. In one, a young girl, screaming, flings buckets of paint at a canvas as a performance in front of Rome’s art collecting elite. The audience’s reaction to the girl, entirely enrapt, shows their craving for a genuine expression of emotion.
“La Grande Bellezza,” or “The Great Beauty,” is both broadly and aptly named. It is a summary of lives wound together in an alluring setting, but despite the unquestionable wealth, no one in the film has what they want.
“La Grande Belleza” does not have a linear plot. It flits from story to character to place, to the present and tomorrow and the past again. There is a disconnectedness that pervades portions of the film, but the fluid tone that is presented within the cinematography is continuous. It moves and glows like honey that puts you in an inescapable, lilting trance, stuck in Rome. The viewer is left both grasping for a fuller tale and hoping a scene will end.
The focus of the plot, if there must be one, is certainly set on Jep Gambardella, a writer who hasn’t published a book since his first one, decades ago. His friends encourage him incessantly to put pen to paper and publish something, anything new. His editor, a confident dwarf, assigns him interviews with a pretentious performance artist whose artificial creativity is, for Jep, uninspiring.
He does not write, will not write, until he feels his voice has something vital and new to say. He reminisces and sits atop his seat at the highest point of the most prestigious and aristocratic social circles. They are both an example of impeccably high class as well as euro-trash. He is beloved, cigarette hung between his lips, eyes crinkled in a perpetual, faint smile. He surrounds himself with characters, religions and history, stuck in the same city with the same things, unwilling to leave. He will not commit: his days are spent lolling in a hammock with a drink in his hand, his nights follow the same rhythm.
While the characters all seem to ache for something they do not have, there is a distinct humor inserted into dialogue and imagery.
The emotions “La Grande Bellezza” is sure to evoke cannot be illustrated in the confines of words; you must watch it for yourself to feel its multisensory, contradictory, delectable presence.