The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino is re-released

The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino is re-released ten years after its premiere. As convinced Andrey Plakhov, this period turned out to be sufficient for the film to become a classic and at the same time not to become obsolete in terms of issues.

The translation into Russian of the name “La grande bellezza”, formally accurate, does not take into account the irony inherent in it. Italy is a country so overflowing with beauties that “great beauty” seems to be automatically taken in quotation marks, so it was not without reason that one wit once suggested translating the name of the painting as “Beauty”. It’s so beautiful it’s nauseating.

The Great Beauty is a loose remake of La Dolce Vita. That name, of course, was also extremely ironic. But the story went down, as they say, without quotes. La dolce vita is an authentic lifestyle, philosophy and worldview of the European bohemia of the legendary, almost ancient Rome, this “Hollywood on the Tiber” of the late 1950s – early 1960s, which Federico Fellini showed with such glamor and brilliance in his film.

But where is Fellini now? Where are Visconti, Antonioni, Pasolini – the great four Italian geniuses? Where are the other two dozen outstanding creators of neorealism? Seems to be as far away as the Titans of the Renaissance. Today, it is Paolo Sorrentino who is considered perhaps the first director of Italy, but it is clear that the score is different here. Passionarity has left Italian cinema, which is why its beauty is secondary and even parodic. The hero of the film is a journalist, as in La Dolce Vita, but if Marcello Rubini was between 30 and 40, then Jep Gambardella turned 65, and he published his first and only novel 40 years ago as a promising writer who came to conquer Rome. Today it is a weary social lion, ready to show off a sharp word and literary erudition at any party and not ready to refuse any of them. He is played by Toni Servillo, today’s number one Italian actor, but he does not look like Marcello Mastroianni not only in age, but also in the type of charisma: bile instead of charm, cynicism instead of skepticism.

His hero is a barometer of the state of Rome, the Eternal City, which suddenly became dead, at the mercy of tourists, lost its living blood and drive. Suicide mania is everywhere, young people are autistic, old people live in memories, even sex has ceased to be erotic. Outwardly, everything seems to be the same. People also have fun, copulate, get drunk, but in fact they seem to have been sucked out of the air. There is no magnificent body of Anita Ekberg, no magnificent Mastroianni. The background characters are bloodless chimeras: a naked actress with a sickle and a hammer in a causal place, churchmen lining up for prophecies to an old missionary woman.

There is no Steiner, the reflective hero of Fellini, who killed himself and his children, tragically losing faith in the meaningfulness of human existence. But the fact of the matter is that there can be no more Steiner. In fact, the hero of Sorrentino is both a journalist Marcello and Steiner, but everything is in the past: once an outstanding person, he actually turned into a mannequin. Only in the finale something alive dawns: before the hero is the image of a young lover, who is naked in the coastal boulders – but this is only a memory.

Sorrentino, even before The Young Pope, made probably his best film; He was awarded an Oscar and many other prizes. But we know: Fellini was simply not around – god-fighting and god-creating, but at the same time life-loving, earthly, sensual. And we feel this carnality in all Fellini’s films, which absolutely did not prevent him from being truly spiritual. Now, it seems that it is impossible to combine both to the maximum. Sorrentino works in imitation mode, and if Fellini’s paintings were once said to be decadence, then The Great Beauty should be considered the decadence of decadence.

Meanwhile, Italy and Rome remained – the Great Beauty also speaks of this, already without quotes. The eternal city, despite its decline, is still full of almost unbearable, intoxicating beauty – and weary Virgil guides us through this earthly paradise, easily turned into an earthly hell. Years will pass – for sure there will be more than one cult film about Rome. And over the past decade, Sorrentino has switched to Naples and, after The Hand of God, is filming Parthenope there. Probably, in his hometown, the director found a new impulse of life-giving energy.