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7 September
I believe that a viewer who approaches The Great Beauty (2013) as narration, not meditation, is missing its best qualities
Humbert Humbert
Or
Un bel homme au charme irrésistible malgré les premiers signes de la vieillesse
Film-titles are problematic.
The title of The Way Way Back (2013) is meant to be provocative, so 'the problem' is systemically desirable from the point of view of the film-makers, their supporters, distributors, etc.
On my understanding, the original Italian title of La Grande Bellezza just means something like immense beauty*, or maybe, more loosely, very beautiful - and the film exquisitely, almost hyper-realistically, is beautifully composed, shot, edited.
Talking about the film in English under the name 'The Great Beauty' makes one think that someone of the kind of Claudia Cardinale is its unattainable star - if there is such an unattainable star, it is, as one will surely appreciate in and through the filming, Rome.
Yes, The Eternal City - and, yes, Una Grande Attrice, starring above all others in cinema from Roman Holiday (1953) to To Rome With Love (2012)**, with La Dolce Vita (1960) and others in between. But, most of all, Fellini’s Roma (1972) for an insight into Sorrentino’s vision for what this film could (or should) be / mean.
Who knows whether it is a riposte in any way to Allen’s opera-singing, showering undertaker, or his Cruz-realized cheery prostitute, but the worlds are worlds apart : they are, in fact, more the mainly well-heeled world of another Fellini, 8½ (1963), and Federico’s Guido Anselmi is a puzzler in the vein of Paolo’s Jep Gambardella. Whether he puzzles us is not the real issue, but how what he / life / Rome is puzzles him is his real – and our proper – concern.
Jep is not easily impressed, but we both see him cry, and reduce another to the need to escape the company in which he has just, so perfectly, so mercilessly, delivered humiliation. (For a moment, we think that she will outface him / them and stay. What does Jep expect, in this cruel attack on pretension and pompous self-inflation ?)
What he cries at, along with the daydreams, reveries, fantasies that he shares with Guido is at the heart of this film. Akin to Marcello Mastroianni’s mastery, Jep is brought to us to a tee by Toni Servillo as this man who is just as capable of demolishing as building up, a restless individual of talent, but little direction. He is not a Citizen Kane, but his roots do lie deep in what he cannot forget, and maybe few others know about - unlike Kane, Jep is alive, and he makes a confession to himself about how he lives – has chosen to live – at the conclusion of the film.
Comparisons with Warsaw Bridge (1990), screened in the Festival’s lovely Catalan strand in 2012, are also not inappropriate, would that overload had not stripped many memories of watching it – the nuances, the humour, the shallowness of society were all, I nevertheless know, all reminiscent. But Fellini informs so much more, and the man whom Jep has forced his novelette-authoring soul to embrace being is, although quite alien to him, all that he is left with when he cannot be other than he is (nothing to do with his age ?) :
He can hurt, but he can also heal. Perhaps we here see Jep attracted to what he is not able to be, and vice versa, because in some Jungian archetypical way they are complementary personalities, two sides of one coin…
The film is not an easy ride, but it is a phlegmatic one, not one that relies on linearity, literality, logic – just a shame that, as my Italian source confirms, the sub-titles are a poor reflection of the dialogue, on which, and not on whose rendering, I shall attempt to turn my attention next time around.
End-notes
* After writing that, I secured agreement from a convenient and friendly person with Italian credentials. (I have few.)
** I make no apologies for rating that film on a par with Midnight in Paris (2011), because the former is not that weak, nor the latter that strong, despite what is claimed about both.
*** Amazingly turned into Nine (2009) with the participation of the late Anthony Minghella.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
