“La Grande Bellezza” by Paolo Sorrentino, Roman holiday of freaks

Alessandro Sicuro, Italian Journalist and blogger, wrote this in his blog in jun 2013:

Italy also wishes to be sure-com America  me Kathy Kiefer

La Grande Bellezza,  by Paolo Sorrentino, Roman holiday of freaks

“La Grande Bellezza ”  (The great beauty) of Paolo Sorrentino:

THE REVIEW  A blank shot from the starter’s cannon of Gianicolo, straight in the eye of the beholder, at the beginning of the film. And so we hear the celestial songs by a female choir, while going to a shot by the water of a Japanese tourist:   nothing but pictures to put on Image Shack, the image is a shock, because the beautiful image looks worn out, even those that don’t: and off you go again – this time to a dance at the party of “Jeb Gambardella”  (Toni Servillo), writer (a single novel, 40 years earlier) and King of worldly glamour with a flash of disco kitsch rejoicing in the night,  which makes courtesans sweat asunder, and upstart compatriots lost in the crowd and  cronies of partying, flashy well-dressed and well-meaning, and the non-thinking, aspiring writers and rivers of cocaine.  A double opening under the banner of a Roman holiday:  that there are those in Rome, who those of us who are in Rome to admire the statues of ancient art and inhale the atmosphere, and those who are on vacation for life like statues.

(Servillo \ Jep: “che lavoro fai?”; Isabella Ferrari \ Orietta: “la ricca”; ancora Jep: “bel lavoro”).

THE SWEET LIFE OR BITTER? – Rome, and a singer who lost his hand, that Jep with writer’s block, Screenshot-2013-04-18-a-656×391 15:44:56-condemned (it) to make a pretense of its sensitivity for a gentle flogging of the Romans à la page, who frequented those parties which seems to have become a new Petronius, arbiter of false elegance and culture.   In short, Rome must be the place, for the crisis of a pre-senile senator of the party, and so on; in an aggregate of events that range from the dramatic semi-serious and the grotesque, with two or three funerals, and some fucked, some trip, and people on the verge of a nervous breakdown attacked the rim of a glass and pseudo-artistic performance.  Oscillate, to be precise, into the great void.   The sweet  life?  For most at night, yet to us for the rest, theirs is the bitter life of idleness.

The great beauty of Paolo Sorrentino, in fact, is an outspoken film about nothing, since manifesting Servillo walking into nothing. It’s the same as Servillo \ Jep to serve on one of the many silver dishes, such as cutlery, the starting point for reading in this sense: when he says,  yet bored of the banquets on the balcony of the house, where Flaubert had ambitions to write a novel about nothing.  Moreover, he confesses not to be able to write more after the debut of the juvenile novel.   The human apparatus got lost in the search for a sterile beauty that is not there. Significantly, on the other hand, the fact that the work had been born within the emotional climate of a unique love affair (“you had to be very much in love”), and in these times of engagement on television commission.

It comes out of a new millennium version of involuntary Freaks of Parioli, too deviant for many to conform with the camera that takes advantage of the dance scenes to indulge on the physical version of moral ugliness.  Then we switch to the idea of  much more discovery in the scene where Jep, at yet another party that threatened to take a turn , however, philosophical, unmasks the “lies ” – so called – the friend, the writer committed to the party, claiming civil commitment, but a mother distracted and literate letter recommended, is nothing more than “one of us! One of us! “, which is one of the many vacant unhappy things that you make company between caipirinha and headache.   You can criticize the director conducting rhapsodic and loaded  gallery of 101 Dalmatians landfill:  to do,  however, mea culpa after a moment, in seeing the similarity between scenes of wild dancing, their faces distorted with diaper bacchantes, (magic) and the strip of lunchtime television lunchtime, with men and women from the third level, too old.

CARICATURE OF THE LANDFILL – It is not, therefore, a disarticulation of the script, but its trend for visual epigrams, the modern film version more than those of Martial, which if he had a camera, he would have used it for this humanity scene.  And just like the ancient Roman writer said, “Our page has the flavor of man:” Loaded, at times on the verge of unpleasantness for him and with rhetoric – but it is a taste, compared to the bland film. With the courage of his acuity of vision, of course, Sorrentino meets the most successful angles, such as reciting the litany , suspended between bitter tears and laughter, the funeral scene – coincidentally of a freak, a young man suffering from mental distress, basically not so different from the fashionistas  all around him, if not for greater depths, and others perhaps slightly lopsided, such as flamingos resting on the balcony of Jep, while the holy woman lifted up by writer who dispenses pills of the Bible for the rich.

There are even giraffes, to keep company with this more or less bestial humanity: where Buccirosso while at the FRENCH-FILM-FESTIVAL-CANNES seems to have catapulted from a movie, Salemme,  in order to not take itself too seriously, and Verdone … from a film of deep green, with a splash of the most melancholy; Serena Grandi noticed from  Rimini to Rome and Romain carna, with lots of meat, the character of the soubrette useless, but not unused, and honorable mention for a princely Sabrina Ferilli as Ramona, a middle-aged stripper middle-aged naiveté, colored by a dialect and human beauty that stands out, with the full forms of a simple soul, into the emptiness of so many animals.

In this society of fiction – and we use the term in English, perhaps reminiscent of horror films of Bryan Yuzna  about American bourgeoisie – even art and religion take part in Vanity Fair, both positive and negative patterns: Talia Concept ( Anita Kravos ), the artist who does his performance banging his head on the wall and raves about vibrators and vibration, it seems that Marina Abramovic, who does the sale, while the Cardinal (Roberto Herlitzka ) as a receptacle of wisdom that turns into cookbook walking is itself inherently on television: the menu of Benedict . The two would be positive, but they seem to be crushed by the system, just like the feeling of Jep: the girl forced by her father to collect performance art, is transformed into a goose that lays golden eggs, but she cries real tears, the sister Maria – who looks like Mother Teresa – received with honors from the Roman clergy and journalists, is seated on a throne among photographers, but he knows the vessel descending to sleep on the floor or kneeling along the stairways.

FOR HIM TO BE LOVE – Therefore you can’t dismiss the great beauty of Paul Sorrentinola – great – beauty – pictures – as a sterile prodigy of optical illusion: the film seems too long and excessive, like the prospective colonnade of the Palace along with the sword of Borromini, who (Ferilli/Ramona) travels physically, only to realize that it was very short, the result of a trick of the eye (the distance of the columns is shortened and ground-level herbs). Moralizing that the baroque mechanism, which leads to a fake garden of illusions, and even the art historian Erwin Panofsky called a “demon” and evil, in a visual perspective, the film of Sorrentino, functional to the moral emptiness of its optical telescope, and as such at the peril of the great silent-beauty-the-cast-of-the-film-during-the-photo call–in-Cannes- 2013-275950 “moralist.”  It is true, it seems that he began to make love, and he went on with only a impure act: how not to love but the wait dilated beyond belief by the open blouse in flashbacks of the young flame Jep, eighteen years old, in a condensed reminder of an overdose of beauty with which to live with a forty year abstinence?  Her tits, less vulgar, in recent years of cinema (and television), at least as those of Raphael’s Fornarina.  It will be a freak of gaze, the last of Sorrentino:  but how much we love the difference.

“In conclusion, I would like to express my opinion. For me this film, for the beautiful photography, the subject, and the wonderful interpretation of the major players should compete for or even take the Oscar.  Just a wish that all this can be done.”

Directed by: Paolo Sorrentino

Starring: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Serena Grandi, Dobtcheff Vernon, Isabella Ferrari, Luca Marinelli, Giorgio Pasotti, Quilio Giulia Di Massimo Popolizio, Giorgia Ferrero, Roberto Herlitzka, Charles Buccirosso, Pamela Villoresi, Ivan Franek, Stephen Fregni

Alessandro Sicuro