Sorrentino: La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty) (2013)

Paolo Sorrentino’s first film since This Must Be the Place is once again about an aging artist – in this case, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a wealthy Roman novelist who takes stock of his life in the wake of his sixty-fifth birthday. Like This Must be the Place, the narrative is more or less extraneous to a fugue of musical-architectural set pieces – a refrain of frozen notes, or liquid buildings, depending on how you look at it, meticulously controlled and curated as a music video or a fashion shoot. In other words, it is a city symphony film, gradually folding Gambardella’s lavish, decadent party-hopping back into the substance of the city, just as the aristocratic spaces he frequents, and the princes and princesses that he meets, are gradually folded back into the classical structures that they originally colonised. Everything is on the verge of ossifying, turning to stone, as if the excesses of the Berlusconi era were already on the verge of deep classicism. And the film strives to evoke that last beat before its characters fade back into a frieze, just as they strive to prolong it through parties that fuse theatre, cabaret, performance art, site-specific installation and dark aristocratic ritual into a kind of sculptural solidarity, venues where stone can contemplate stone, flanked by porticos of sophisticated strippers and entablatures of burlesque artists. At times, Sorrentino’s camera is not unlike Raúl Ruiz’s in its architectural plasticity, except where Ruiz erects alternative buildings that somehow co-exist with more concrete co-ordinates, Sorrentino builds more directly on what we can already see, completing and consummating Rome with his camera, which conducts, or constructs, as much as it captures the cityscape. And while it’s not at all sentimental – it often matches the blistering disgust of Fellini or Antonioni – there’s a point where Sorrentino’s vision reaches such a panoramic totality that it becomes positively beatific, as if distant enough to determine that Rome's cult of poverty still outweighs its cult of wealth. Exhausting excess to evoke an even more sublime poverty, and exhausting the Berlusconi aristocracy to evoke an even more unimaginable austerity, it’s as much a critique of its era as L’Eclisse or 8 ½, a phantasmagoria of the present, a collective hallucination captured at the very moment that it’s dissipating and dispersing.