The Great Beauty or La grande belezza is a film laced with paradoxes to the point of becoming a paradox in itself. We’re presented with the beautiful city of Rome, in its historical significance and splendor. Director Paolo Sorrentino (This Must Be the Place) has given us a luscious and eye-popping depiction of this glorious city with dazzling colours and epic cinematography, one that is disconnected and sorely lacking in entertainment value.

He breathes life into the culture, from an energetic and hedonistic dance floor sequence of writhing bodies to the paint splatter of a child prodigy emulating boxing artist, Ushio Shinohara. At the centre of this exploration is Jep Gambardella (Servillo), our tour guide and aging playboy, who after his 65th birthday discovers a much more timeless beauty.

Jep is played by Toni Servillo, an actor with a quizzical expression and curious nature. He wants more out of life, having explored the night life for 40 years, the frustrated author turned journalist believes he hasn’t filed the hole in his soul. He remembers an innocent love from his youth and tries to find out what became of her, while forming a relationship with an experienced stripper.

Sorrentino has made the experience just as frustrating for his audience. We’re engulfed by so much visual decadence that it borders on surreal. The footage of Rome is comparable with Fellini’s work, yet we’re kept at a distance from the story. The journalist’s slow-burning epiphany is camouflaged in complexity and we’re constantly distracted by the brilliance of the film-making artistry.

“Meh.” 

The characters are intriguing, yet there’s a thick layer of pretentious upper class drivel to wade through. The “support group” musings are steeped in vocabulary, yet pithy in sentiment, making us feel disconnected from the film. We’re so busy picking up bread crumbs to the story and being blown away by the visuals that we become alienated and apathetic to Jep’s plight.

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is a 10/10 film in its masterful execution, delivering lavish production values: shooting in some epic locations around Rome, soaking up the sights and sounds of Italy by means of breathtaking cinematography and a series of delightfully quirky characters and surprising scenarios.

Unfortunately, while a true spectacle, it’s a 1/10 movie when it comes to connecting with its audience, delivering tarnished entertainment values via insular characters, frigid performances, pretentious-to-inane dialogue, bizarre storytelling and rather sluggish pacing.

We’re drawn to the great beauty of The Great Beauty, discovering much like our protagonist, how hollow aesthetic pleasures can be, and then forced to endure the same frustration of suffering through this facade of a film.

If this lofty objective is what Sorrentino was after, then he has succeeded in delivering a precise, picture perfect and painstaking artwork. The Great Beauty’s worth seeing for all the things he gets right, unfortunately, it isn’t just one frame in an art gallery and takes 2 1/2 hours to see.

The bottom line: Frustrating

Release date: 26 September, 2014
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