Jep Gambardella, who once wrote a famous novel in his twenties, only to retire into a comfortable life writing cultural columns and throwing parties in Rome. After his 65th birthday party, he walks through the ruins and city streets, encountering the various characters, bitterly recollecting his passionate youth.
Celebrating Rome in all its decay, this florid comedy by Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo, This Must Be the Place) opens with a hyperbolically gaudy party honoring a celebrity journalist on his 65th birthday.
"The Great Beauty" is a great romance: a man and a city and a love that cannot be consummated but which will consume you surely. Somewhere, Baz Luhrmann weeps.
It's a beauty, all right. It's more a style show than a deep philosophical treatise, but with surfaces this sleek and faces this interesting, I'll take style over substance any day.
Throughout the film, Sorrentino delivers gorgeous images, crazy images, startling and sexy and serene images; it's a visual bath of sorts - the great beauty is everywhere, Jep (and we) just have to be open to it.
Sometimes too overblown, surreal and obtuse for its own good, director Paolo Sorrentino's film is nonetheless an exquisitely composed portrait of vapidity and decline.
The Great Beauty is an utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty that evokes Fellini's La Dolce Vita by way of Baz Luhrmann.
