The Great Beauty (2013)
(La grande bellezza)
Country: IT/FR
Technical: col/2.35:1 142m
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli
Synopsis:
Rome: a writer who owes his fame to one novel written in his youth divides his time between interview assignments for a highbrow magazine and the banalities of the nocturnal high life. Gradually, a series of events cause him to look back on an episode of his early love life as emblematic of the beauty he lives in hope of re-experiencing.
Review:
With its weightlessly roving camera and cast of Roman intellectuals and debauchees, this cannot help but recall the Fellini of La dolce vita and Otto e mezzo, and in a manner too replete with coincidences to be unintended. This is but one of the charms of an excessively fine script and mise en scène, where the protagonist's otiose complacency never quite tips into superciliousness but retains a sense of its own frailty, just as the cutting edge of his acuity is merciless for those with less self-knowledge than he. A film which must repay repeated viewings, given the plenitude of its allusions to art, architecture, sculpture and drug culture, and one which risks everything on the ever-present Servillo's performance as the weary sybarite. The gambit pays off handsomely.
(La grande bellezza)
Country: IT/FR
Technical: col/2.35:1 142m
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli
Synopsis:
Rome: a writer who owes his fame to one novel written in his youth divides his time between interview assignments for a highbrow magazine and the banalities of the nocturnal high life. Gradually, a series of events cause him to look back on an episode of his early love life as emblematic of the beauty he lives in hope of re-experiencing.
Review:
With its weightlessly roving camera and cast of Roman intellectuals and debauchees, this cannot help but recall the Fellini of La dolce vita and Otto e mezzo, and in a manner too replete with coincidences to be unintended. This is but one of the charms of an excessively fine script and mise en scène, where the protagonist's otiose complacency never quite tips into superciliousness but retains a sense of its own frailty, just as the cutting edge of his acuity is merciless for those with less self-knowledge than he. A film which must repay repeated viewings, given the plenitude of its allusions to art, architecture, sculpture and drug culture, and one which risks everything on the ever-present Servillo's performance as the weary sybarite. The gambit pays off handsomely.
(La grande bellezza)
Country: IT/FR
Technical: col/2.35:1 142m
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli
Synopsis:
Rome: a writer who owes his fame to one novel written in his youth divides his time between interview assignments for a highbrow magazine and the banalities of the nocturnal high life. Gradually, a series of events cause him to look back on an episode of his early love life as emblematic of the beauty he lives in hope of re-experiencing.
Review:
With its weightlessly roving camera and cast of Roman intellectuals and debauchees, this cannot help but recall the Fellini of La dolce vita and Otto e mezzo, and in a manner too replete with coincidences to be unintended. This is but one of the charms of an excessively fine script and mise en scène, where the protagonist's otiose complacency never quite tips into superciliousness but retains a sense of its own frailty, just as the cutting edge of his acuity is merciless for those with less self-knowledge than he. A film which must repay repeated viewings, given the plenitude of its allusions to art, architecture, sculpture and drug culture, and one which risks everything on the ever-present Servillo's performance as the weary sybarite. The gambit pays off handsomely.