THE GREAT BEAUTY (LA GRANDE BELLEZZA) 1/18/14

I HATED the pretentious film THE GREAT BEAUTY and won't write my usual review -  rather  I am jotting down some reflections...but had to allow my squirmy, moaning, muttering self - I am a terribly annoying movie partner to settle down. Judith who went with me had to literally kick my leg to shut me up. (She's allowed to do that by the way - we are such good friends.)

I am both perversely attracted and repelled by Germanic history, and the tragedy of my own German heritage - an internal antenna inside of me is finely tuned  to absolutist and monocratic proclamations - so the premise of the search for the glorification of the IDEAL of "GREAT BEAUTY" makes me tremble, bringing  me back to Aryanism.  But I tend to go there very quickly. I too am captivated by the rare blossoming of pulchritude (a word that sounds ugly) and often swivel my head to gaze at loveliness with appreciation, but that does not keep me from the day to day, often tedious business of going on with my life and work. The search for "Great Beauty" is no excuse to live an aimless life. Not in my book. The"romanticism" with the past is over-blown and "dangerously destructive."

This retro Fellini-esque film brought me back to the panting, excited girl who was seeing Italian and "foreign movies" in the Art Houses of the 60's; the enveloping darkness was erotic and mysterious;  those movies...oops "films"  were fresh and felt grounded in a magic that was new and enchanting, shattering the projected conventions of its period. THE GREAT BEAUTY was full of what some perceived as "deep", pithy, "philosophical" statements uttered by a jaded, older, seen-it-all, one book under his belt, AESTHETE whose boredom was YES boring.

Tony Servillo plays Jep Gambardella whose 65th birthday festivity  is an important pivotal moment in the film, which begins with his celebratory bacchanal. I did not mind  the director, Paolo Sorrentino's quoting other artists. Bernardo Bertolucci could touch upon the self-illusions that we need to construct for ourselves in order to survive, particularly in The Conformist brilliantly. But in this case the referencing was pure parody.  I was also uninterested in most of the characters, except the participants in an art performance dealing with Botox vignettes, addressing the fine touches we resort to in order to experience once again the ripe luster of youth.  Had the director conveyed the enthusiasts' "anguish" with greater conviction,  I might have been more sympathetic.

Undoubtedly I kept thinking about the Berlusconi years which continue today, but feel that someone in the future will do a film about that period of history more incisively. I bristled at the dialogue, the upper-class one-dimensional Fellini-but-not-Fellini eccentrics trying to find meaning through excess tiring me out to the point that my eyes were closing - opening only when  the one "echt" (interesting) person turns out to be a woman"dwarf" who actually revels in her daily ventures - a welcoming exception.

Many of my friends loved this movie - particularly those who have been to Rome. Nostalgia pins us to hours - even seconds from an earlier existence - when we can go back and shave off flakes of delicate memory. Even the cinematography felt predictable - shots of the moving clouds in the sky, the rippling water and of course views of the Coliseum - the site of great triumphs, brutality and decay - symbolic of the desultory lives of the film's self-conscious personalities.