First Enchantment - The
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From The Point Magazine:
Ten years ago, Seth and I were college students sitting in the back row of the indie cinema in Columbia, Missouri, waiting to be moved in a language we did not understand. It began with sacred music: an old tourist clicking his camera to capture the marvels of Rome at high noon—then dropping to the ground, killed by the overwhelming beauty. We then fell into the grandest and most unforgettable of party scenes, an ostentatious, almost unending celebration of the old pretending they are still young, draping themselves in costumes, music and vulgarity. The rich dance to "La Colita," the protagonist steps between two rows of dancers and lights a cigarette, everything slows and the camera approaches Jep Gambardella’s motionless face as he we hear his thoughts:
To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: "pussy." Whereas I answered, "The smell of old people’s houses." The question was: "What do you really like most in life?" I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.
The camera cuts to reveal a view of the whole—the party atop the hotel and, in the distance, the title of the film rising in the twilight of Rome. My friend and I looked at each other: we knew we were entering a cinematic experience.
Two and a half hours later, as the lights in the theater glowed up from the floor and the room remained motionless, stunned in half-darkness, someone knocked over an empty beer glass. It shattered and cut through our silence and awe. We exhaled and exited the theater, slowly reaching for words to describe our encounter.
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One decade has passed since La Grande Bellezza won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Long before then, Sorrentino found acclaim with early films that tested what would become his signature preoccupations and techniques: the swooping camera shots; the play with darkness and light; the lyrical pronouncements; the collaboration with Toni Servillo; the inner lives of men in power. After The Great Beauty, Sorrentino continued exploring how adults struggle to come to terms with the disappointments of their lives—and seek to overcome ordinary reality for deepened encounters with the self—through the artists converging at a Swiss resort in Youth (2015), a two-part biopic of Silvio Berlusconi (Loro, 2018) and The Young Pope (2016) and The New Pope (2020), TV series imagining the first American pope navigating the politics of the Vatican while searching for the parents who orphaned him. Sorrentino’s most recent work, The Hand of God (2021), earned his second Oscar nomination and resorts to a simpler style to tell the story of his youth: he found purpose in filmmaking after his parents died from carbon monoxide poisoning on a weekend trip to their cabin while he stayed behind to watch Diego Maradona play for Napoli. All of these works are well-crafted and moving, but The Great Beauty is Sorrentino’s masterpiece, and the only one with the power to change who I would become.
The Great Beauty taught me to seek a life of wisdom, vitality and deepened experience. At the same time, the illusions corroding the protagonists enchanted me: I bought white trousers, many-colored blazers, pocket squares and two-toned brogues. I traveled to Rome, the most necessary trip of my life. When I taught a college class for the first time, I could only think to show the students Jep’s final monologue. I was determined to learn the secrets of Sorrentino’s art; I purchased the Criterion edition and sat down to reverse engineer it, scene by scene, pausing every frame to reconstruct the screenplay in a special notebook I bought, as if one could capture the grandeur of the Colosseum by taking it apart brick by brick. Later I lent my copy to one of the beauties of my youth, a pizza waitress with long brown hair and artistic ambitions. When she moved to Los Angeles to found a design agency, she took with her this prized possession, so I bought another copy of the Criterion edition, and lent it away, and bought another copy, and another, always searching for and returning to this mysterious, enduring film.
Every few months I discover I am not alone: in every imaginable social setting, small talk, pleasant banalities, questions asked to prevent the body from slumping asleep, then a stranger mentions travel, then I mention Rome and walk us, shyly, to the topic of the cinema of Sorrentino, and suddenly we both awaken. Our gestures find more range of motion, our speech animates, and we speak as if we had frequented the same playgrounds in childhood, recalling precious scenes. With each of these encounters I discover that we have been transformed by The Great Beauty. But, over the past decade, how has the film itself transformed?
The premise remains familiar: Jep Gambardella celebrates his 65th birthday; soon after, he learns his first love, his only true love, Elisa, has died. In his youth Jep published The Human Apparatus, which nearly every character regards as a great novel, but he gave up novels for sporadic arts reportage and a life of wealth and excess. As he says in one of his most famous monologues,
When I came to Rome at the age of 26, I fell pretty swiftly, almost without realizing it, into what might be defined as the whirlpool of the high life. But I didn’t want to just live the high life. I wanted to be the king of the high life. And I succeeded. I didn’t just want to go to parties. I wanted to have the power to make them a failure.
Jep struggles to do anything meaningful, struggles to find beauty in the meaninglessness of his way of being. Yet the loss of Elisa spurs Jep to reflection, and after an encounter with Sister Maria, a 103-year-old nun devoted to helping the sick—a woman who leads a life of meaning in old age—Jep resolves to write another novel, the novel that he lived through all along, The Great Beauty.
When the film first came out in 2013, critics in Italy attacked Sorrentino for his documentation of the effects of Berlusconi’s reign on the culture—the vulgar social climbing, the decadent parties, the lack of creative energy or purpose. "It disturbed many people," Luca Bigazzi, the director of photography, said in a 2014 interview. "The horror represented in the film involved all of us—intellectuals, politicians, artists, writers." And because "the umpteenth result of the last twenty years is that Italians are full of hatred, they hate themselves, they hate each other, they hate everything that the country produces, and not just culturally." Italians "sanctimoniously accepted" The Great Beauty "only as it became a hit at the world’s box offices and got international recognition."
Yet after ten years, this film, once so divisive for its biting portrait of Italy’s cultural decline, now seems more mysterious, as if it has drifted out of time. Sorrentino refrained from including markers of the contemporary—only two pieces of recent technology, cell phones and a home-security system, appear on screen—and he shot the film in a soft, grainy half-light. Umberto Contarello, the film’s co-writer, once said in an interview that they set the film in "a present day that was a bit vague and out of sync with real time. Because we realized we had no intention of making a film that could be read in a two-dimensional manner as a reflection or critique or judgment of our day." This gives the impression that Jep’s Rome could have been the Rome of five years ago, or fifty, and that its characters could have lived in any time too. The depth of Jep’s yearning—to find meaning in the meaningless, to dwell within time—becomes the yearning of all great cinema and literature, and of all of us who care to listen to our inner voices.
This film, once a flash point for its political commentary, now endures through its eternal dialectics: the unresolved tension between the sacred and profane, the beautiful and grotesque. We meet a cardinal who cares nothing about the spiritual life, only caring to ramble about recipes, as well as the ascetic 103-year-old nun who sleeps on the floor, lives in poverty, and climbs the steps to St. John’s Basilica on her ancient, bony hands and knees. The soundtrack swings from the tender vibrations of the Kronos Quartet to floor-thumping club mixes. In the beginning, the tourist dying with a thud, and suddenly the screams of a dancer caked in makeup. Parties and hangovers; journalism and literature; spectacle and genuine performance; strippers and existential dialogues.
The Great Beauty also draws us with the camera’s beautiful style of glimpsing, which lends every scene the feeling that we will soon, finally, uncover the secrets to our malaise. Often the camera presents a character gazing in wonder before turning to show us the source of that wonder: it swoops through the ancient city and ends by conjuring a glimpse of revelation behind a door, down a cobbled street. The ends of sentences hold secrets, and we hold our breaths to hear them. In the opening monologue Jep saves the question, not the answer, for the end. Later, in lines I took as seriously as any inspired teenager would, Jep declares that "the most important thing I discovered a few days after turning 65 is that I can’t waste any more time doing things I don’t want to do." Here too the camera narrates: a woman tells Jep she will get her laptop to show him naked photos of herself; he smokes on the balcony as the voice-over plays; the camera cuts to the woman entering the room, then turns to the balcony, where we can no longer find Jep. Sorrentino stages the slow movement of the camera, his characters like subjects in paintings by Vermeer, gazing at us, looking at what we cannot see.
In an essay for Criterion, Phillip Lopate pointed out how "from time to time, Jep is asked, or asks himself, why he has never written another novel, and he comes up with various lines like ‘Rome makes you waste a lot of time’ or ‘I went out too much at night’ or ‘I was lazy,’ or ‘This is my life, and it’s nothing. Flaubert wanted to write a book about nothing but failed, so how am I supposed to?’ When Jep is asked by the saint why he has never written a second novel, this time he answers wistfully, ‘I was looking for the great beauty.’" His search animates the film, and on every viewing our answer to his conundrum changes. What is the great beauty?
In his introduction to a recent book commemorating the film’s ten-year anniversary, Sorrentino dismisses the most obvious possibility: "It would be too easy and tempting to answer Rome. Perhaps, instead, in the final analysis, the great beauty is exactly this gigantic effort of living that in Rome seems so hidden, slippery and insidious, precisely because, at times, life here does not appear tiring at all."
The film also offers its own answers. The Great Beauty, after all, displays the events that inspire Jep’s second novel, the one he begins with his final lines. And Jep watches as several other characters attempt to find or create beauty and meaning through art, beginning with Talia Concept, a performance artist who "lives on vibrations" and wraps her head in gauze and screams as she sprints naked—red pubic hair etched with hammer and sickle on display—headfirst into an ancient aqueduct. Another woman tells Jep she takes photos of herself with her phone "at all times of the day, to get to know myself." In one scene, a man throws knives to carve in paint the outline of a woman standing against a black backdrop. Afterward, a tormented child slams and smears paint against a massive canvas, beating her hands against the paint, crying, screaming. Jep watches a magician make a giraffe vanish and surveys an exhibition of photos a man and his father took of his face every day, from childbirth, for decades. Jep’s friend Romano performs a dramatic monologue to the strumming of an acoustic guitar, saying, "I spent all my summers making plans for September. Not any longer. Now I spend the summer remembering the good intentions which vanished. In part because of laziness, in part because of carelessness. What’s wrong with feeling nostalgic? It’s the only distraction left for those who have no faith in the future. Without rain, August is coming to an end, and September isn’t arriving. And I’m so ordinary." Romano voices the perspective of Jep’s circle, the aged dreamers who now languish in nostalgia and defeat. The camera cuts to the woman whose opinion matters most to Romano: she had been scrolling her phone through the monologue, and she grabs her purse and leaves, while Romano decides to abandon his dreams in Rome. Across these scenes, Sorrentino presents the hobbyist art of the upper classes—the art of ego, wealth and delusion—but also genuine art, lasting art, frail human endeavors to be more present in the world and share in feeling with another.
Sorrentino permits Jep glimpses of meaning before returning to the banal. Great beauty slips from us, is not whole; time passes like the water of the Tiber. Sorrentino suggests news of Elisa’s death brings Jep back to a search for the real; he sees her in the sea he imagines on his bedroom ceiling. Jep also seeks recourse beyond art, even appealing to the cardinal who goes on talking about his recipe for a Ligurian-style rabbit. One way to read Jep’s return to writing is what happens next: Jep standing at a limousine, receiving through a half-lowered window the quick incantation of an exorcist. Or what happens after: Sister Maria, who sleeps on the floor, telling Jep she knows the Christian names of the flock of flamingoes on the balcony, saying, "Do you know why I only eat roots? Because roots are important," and exhaling to send the birds onward to their migration west. It may not be art but an encounter with the sacred that allows Jep to believe in writing again: the example of the saint, an embodiment of the daily practice of steadfast being in the world.
In one of the film’s deleted scenes, Jep interviews an aging filmmaker who speaks to the title, positing the great beauty as simply finding wonder in the everyday. Bigazzi has called it the only positive scene because the character speaks "healthy, positive, wise words," but Sorrentino cut it in the end because "it would have diminished the film’s political impact." The filmmaker is one of the few characters who seems to have not been condemned to a life of waste and regret. He speaks wistfully, carefully. He tells Jep his next film will be "about a girl whose eyes change color every time she opens and closes them … blue, green, black, then blue again. As if by magic." Here we find the image of a character who makes art with simple joy, without being corrupted by delusion or self-doubt. The scene would have interrupted the tension of Jep’s seeking and diffused the effect of his encounter with the saint at the end. The beauty of The Great Beauty emanates from the search for it, and the filmmaker would have provided too direct of an answer for the viewer and for Jep. After describing the girl whose eyes change color, the filmmaker goes on to reveal that his character was inspired by "the first enchantment I felt, which wasn’t for a girl. It was for the first traffic light installed in Milan, where the Piazza del Duomo and Via Torino come together. My father set me on his shoulders to see over the huge crowd. Can you imagine? A crowd! Thronging to see a traffic light! What beauty! What great beauty!"
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When Seth and I emerged from the theater that day, we left with new ideas about art and the meaning of life. This continued each time I returned to the film, studying every frame, reconstructing the script. I knew what everything meant, and how. Early, Jep rising from the hammock, the camera following him before lingering on the Colosseum: he is the ruins.
The older I become, the less I understand. The more I mature into Jep’s experience, the more I fall into confusion. Forensics fail me; I can no longer grasp the characters and pin them to the lines of my notebook. As time passes, the more real they become: "This is how it always ends," Jep says in the end. "With death. But first there was life. Hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah. It’s all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty."
"Masterpieces transform the way we feel and perceive things," Sorrentino once said of Fellini’s influence on him. "They condition us, despite ourselves." A masterpiece like The Great Beauty penetrates our illusions, our self-certainties, our ennui. It allows us to take the stance of Sorrentino, who wrote, "I try not to believe the furious invective of others against the smallness, the inefficiency, the carelessness, the cultural and moral poverty of this capital. Cowardly, I cover my ears. Because I don’t want them to ruin my dream. And so I prefer to concentrate on the sweetness of certain sunsets that exhaust the eyes, on an inexplicable, suspended mildness of the climate and state of mind that only Rome allows you, on the slow aimless walks that always promise to lead you to new and unrepeatable places. And sometimes they keep their promises."