Paolo Sorrentino The Great Beauty LA GRANDE BELLEZZA Drama • 2013 • 2h 22m

Name: Jep

Surname: Gambardella

Age: 65 years

Profession: writer of a book titled "The Human Apparatus", journalist, dandy.

Distinctive traits: complacent indolence, indiscreet explorer of human vices

Having moved to Rome many years ago to become the inquisitor of worldliness, he feeds on an infinite human zoological apparatus, a circus of "unpresentable" characters.

Rome is the indispensable pretext: its powerful and impassive beauty makes it great, imposing, and indifferent. A sumptuously sly city, where Jep wanders in a tired and disenchanted yet curious manner, among a humanity in an evident state of decay.

Villa Borghese, Gianicolo, Piazza Navona, terrace overlooking the Colosseum, sumptuous noble palaces: "Rome or death". An anthem over which triumphs Carrà's "a far l'amore comincia tu" in the tacky cover by Bob Sinclair; music from the grotesque and fleeting stupor of baroque and vulgar parties in a cafonal rhythm. A hellish nightmare over which Jep the inquisitor's sarcastic smile hovers.

Strippers like window clings, group dances from holiday villages.

From Preisner's Dies Irae to the Torino Vocalensemble, human frescoes, children, gardens, loopholes; exasperated aesthetics, empty and sorrowful snobs steeped in decadent intellectualism.

"Marxism has been completed in Rome, you can't stand out for more than a week"... the vortex of worldliness engulfs you, definitively demolishing the fragility of appearances. Living on the brink of despair seems a right, and making fun of oneself a duty.

The project lies in demolishing the futility of wealth, which is more harmful than useless.

Cosmetic surgery, erythrosis, excess, horror, obscenity: a sublime SPOT on human emptiness; a novel without a story of a pseudo existential performance; a disjointed and unfinished puzzle of a beauty too great to be beautiful: there is no proportion, nor right measure.

Nostalgia remains the only pastime for those who distrust the future, and a novel about nothing cannot be written. Boredom becomes nausea and the Apollonian without Dionysian absolute putrefaction of the surface without depth.

Only the saint in slippers eats roots and does not talk about poverty "because poverty is not told but lived".

The madman who announced the death of God does not find the great beauty, let alone the superman, but a wretch who can only decree the death of the human, life as a tomb. Beauty is simply a moment and life is just a trick.

A film of fragments of a torn discourse before which Munch would make a horrid grimace rather than a scream.

We are officials in the hands of the will; the traces of the sacred are no longer visible.

A direct gaze, majestically decadent; an illuminating and blinding vision, a cadenced and aphasic language, an invasive and presumptuous touch.

The great beauty and the infinite hidden misery.

Thus spoke Sorrentino, a film for everyone and no one. Amen