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5 September 2013updated 14 Sep 2021 3:31pm

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty: Directed with a hammer wrapped in velvet

The Great Beauty represents a clear maturation in style for Paolo Sorrentino - a film that is both emphatic and proportionate in its methods.

By Ryan Gilbey

The Great Beauty (15)
dir: Paolo Sorrentino
 
The opening shot of The Great Beauty is just that: a shot. The camera stares into the gunbarrel of a cannon as it sends a shell almost directly into our faces. Audiences familiar with the director Paolo Sorrentino would be forgiven for thinking: “Here we go again.”
 
It’s no surprise when a tourist drops dead a moment later, or a partygoer screams in close-up: haven’t we all felt like doing one or the other when watching a Sorrentino film? He is not, after all, the kind of director who ever takes the softly-softly approach when the very-very-noisily-with-whooping-andcrashing one is an option.
 
For all his Scorsese slickness, Sorrentino’s true forebear in films such as Il Divo and The Family Friend has been Oliver Stone. Like him, Sorrentino directs with a hammer, even if he wraps it in velvet first.
 
He threw out the hammer for his last film, This Must Be the Place, which starred Sean Penn as a fey, Nazi-hunting Goth rock star (great idea, lousy movie). But in The Great Beauty he has at last located the middle ground between a contemplative sensibility and a dynamic style of cinema. The picture is set in a modern Rome of overripe hedonism, full of parties that would render the “great” Gatsby merely so-so. Hi-NRG music throbs as naked bodies roll lethargically on nightclub floors like rotisserie chickens turning on a spit; a woman bursts out of a model of the Colosseum while the real thing glows serenely a few hundred yards away.
 
Taking his lead from his protagonist, the 65-year-old journalist and socialite Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), Sorrentino regards this world with an amused detachment. It is palpable even when his camera is pushed in the faces of gurning partygoers, whooshing across azure waters or prowling nocturnal gardens like a panther.
 
This is the Rome of Fellini and Berlusconi in equal measure. Indeed, the shape of the film resembles Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, featuring an insider-outsider as our guide through the landscape of radioactively glowing cocktails and gyrating conga lines. Jep is partial to this society’s delights but aware of its hazards. He has failed to follow up his first, widely admired novel, blaming his wilted potential on Rome: “It makes you waste a lot of time.” He calls it “the whirlpool of the high life” – and while he will regulate the temperature and even dip a toe in from time to time, he has seen too much to be dragged fully into the vortex. Referring to the partygoers as “this wildlife”, he could almost be an anthropologist. The film responds to this in kind by isolating Jep through tight closeups, slow-motion and theatrical spotlights. Given Sorrentino’s general progress in the direction of subtlety, we can forgive him for clinging on to his trademark lighting scheme, which is half rock concert, half electrical storm.
 
If it’s disappointing that there is no single encapsulating image to rival that of Christ dangling above Rome from a helicopter in La Dolce Vita, at least the air of dislocated absurdity rarely wanes. In this unshockable culture, religion has shaded into show business, art into violence. A performance piece features a blindfolded woman running full pelt into a stone pillar. A knife-thrower tosses blades at a hapless volunteer, each incision producing a spurt of blue paint that creates a spattered outline in the canvas behind her, as though Jackson Pollock had marked out the scene of a crime. A child who seems to be in the grip of a primal tantrum hurls paint cans at a vast white screen while an audience of chin-scratching sophisticates gazes on silently. “That girl was crying,” someone says, recoiling. “Nonsense,” Jep replies, “she earns millions.”
 
The Great Beauty has no strikingly original argument. Its lament for the spiritual void beneath what Jep calls the “blah blah blah” is a familiar one, particularly in Italian cinema, stretching from the heyday of Fellini and Antonioni right up to Matteo Garrone’s recent prickly comedy Reality, in which an ordinary man loses his sanity trying to become a Big Brother contestant.
 
But Sorrentino’s film is both emphatic and proportionate in its methods – a palpable maturing for this director. He still loves his whiz-bang camera moves and slice-and-dice editing, except now he is starting to master tempo, too.
 
In one quieter moment, a woman tips her head back to stem a nosebleed and sees her bad habits reflected above her in an image that brings to mind the words of Marc Almond: “The sky is scarred with the trail of a plane/Seems that God’s cutting out thick white lines of cocaine.”
 
“The Great Beauty” opens on 6 September
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