A 21st-century masterpiece and one of the most analyzed and acclaimed films of recent years, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza) tells the story of an aging journalist and man about town, once a promising novelist who has since filled his life with the shallow pursuits of trendy high society. The “town” in question is Rome, Italy; the pursuits take him through some of the Eternal City’s most beautiful and mysterious locations as well as the moral and spiritual emptiness of life in the Berlusconi era. Often compared with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), Sorrentino’s work recalls various other highlights of Italian cinema but emerges as a wholly original tale, its melancholy view of lost love and dashed dreams tempered by flashes of hope and extraordinary beauty. The film made the best-of-the-year lists of many prominent critics (and Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar) and in 2016 was ranked among the 100 greatest since 2000 in an international poll of 177 critics. It also won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The central character, Jep Gambardella, is played by Toni Servillo, a frequent Sorrentino collaborator (10 films, including Il Divo, 2008, and the upcoming The Hand of God, 2021). The film is a feast of dichotomies – old and young, ancient and contemporary, sacred and profane, upper and lower class, cultured and oblivious – not least in the brilliant soundtrack, which mixes compositions by the likes of Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, Georges Bizet and William Blake with pounding electronic dance music and pop songs by Annie Lennox and Damien Jurado. The film was shot entirely in Rome, with an excursion to Tuscany’s Isola del Giglio, where Jep pointedly observes the wreckage of the infamous cruise ship, the Costa Concordia. This is roughly the climax of his soul-searching journey, but as Peter Bradshaw said in his review in The Guardian, “for its intense, unbearable melancholy, the final end-title sequence has to be watched through to the very end until the screen goes dark.”

by Rob Nixon