The Great Beauty

[bore]

If no one else is going to use this board, I may as well...

Ariel: You ever heard of the Masada? For two years, 900 Jews held their own against 15,000 Roman soldiers. They chose death before enslavement. The Romans? Where are they now?’
Tony Soprano: You’re looking at them, asshole

With the exception of the Greeks, no nation's glory days are further in the past than the italians. It is perhaps understandable if subsequent residents of the italian peninsula have not been able to equal the Romans centuries long hegemony over a continent and a half and simultaneous creation of our shared language of government, law and religion. This is not to say that many have not tried to do so, and do so by claiming explicitly the mantle of Rome. This act of homage is barely younger than the fall of the empire, in fact for over a century after the canonical fall in 476 the Roman senate coexisted quite happily with the barbarian leaders who now ruled the city, and has continued to the modern day most notably in the founding father’s conception of the United State, an influence that still hobbles the functioning of the world’s pre eminent power.

But though this instinct has been present in hundreds of emperors, kaisers, tsars and presidents in history, for those who are not italians it is best described as a form of cosplay - any degree of absurdity, any degree of mismatch between the claim and the reality can be tolerated as it provokes no existential questioning. For the italians, the genetic and physical (I think something that british people don’t quite get because history has conspired to leave very little architectural trace of the romans century long occupation of our own island, is just how omnipresent the physical reminders of that past are in italy) heirs of Rome, this however can not be the case. The Romans are not just someone to emulate, failing to emulate them is a matter of shame, hence much of the black absurdity of Mussolini’s foreign policy.

Nothing better illustrates this existential problem for an italian alpha male than the exchange from the sopranos episode Denial, Anger, Acceptance quoted above, which comes in the context of hours of horrific but fruitless torture of Ariel, a jewish hotelier. This has not been working because Ariel is more concerned with his honour than with his life, and he explains this is because he is a religious Jew, placing himself in the line of the defenders of Masada, to which Tony responds by asserting himself as the heir to the Romans. It is superficially a witty riposte, but there is no way that someone as conscious of the decline around him as Tony could avoid coming to the conclusion that it is more damning than Ariel’s initial contention that Rome is gone, in much the same way that the 35th season of the simpsons is more damaging than a cancellation 25 years ago would have been. Meaning can only be found by situating yourself in history, but what happens when the act of doing so reveals you to be comically inferior to your elders?

Psychologically this complex is fascinating, but on a moral level it is not, it is a good thing to be unable to emulate Julius Caesar, and anyway Italian arms have been something of a joke almost since the fall of the roman empire. But Italy has also been a country that has until very recently exercised an outsized influence on culture, in which from fashion to opera, sculpture to food and drink, the contributions of Italians are omnipresent. Nowhere was this more prominent than in film, there is a good reason that the nation of Leone, Antinoni, Di Sica and Fellini has won the most oscars for best foreign film, but here too they have undergone a precipitous decline.

The Great Beauty, which is not coincidentally both the most recent italian oscar winner and their only real contender in years, tells the story of Jep Gambardella, played by director Paolo Sorrentino’s muse Toni Servillo, a writer who never followed through on the promise of the novel he published as a young man because he never found anything else to say and so fell into journalism (the natural career for this sort) and the hedonistic Roman good life. As both the art critic of a major newspaper and man about town for four decades he knows everyone of importance in Rome, and so functions as an excellent window into the Italian creative classes and their multifaceted approaches - denial, fatalism, retreat into old certainties- to this loss of respect and relevance. Thus, this is a film that is very obviously in conversation with the great Fellini films of the early 60s, La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, but if 8 ½ is a film about one man dealing with creative bankruptcy after a period of inspiration, The Great Beauty is about a whole society’s.

The performance artists Jep encounters through his work respond to this predicament with denial. They, a woman who runs into a wall and a child forced to throw buckets of paint against a canvas, are united by their cynicism, their fundamentally insincere rage which barely masks how little they have to say. An act of blind fury by definition has very little positive content but the acts Jep sees take this even further- it is not even clear what they are angry about. But it is not so much the performers themselves that Sorrentino is criticising, though the cynicism of the parents forcing their child into performance or the woman’s rambling about vibrations are certainly not depicted positively. Rather it is the reward that these people receive from society for this, the respectful applause of the audience, the millions of euros that the paintings will sell for. Tellingly Jep leaves the child's performance early to take his mistress around some empty churches with a man who has the key to all the most beloved Roman buildings. The contrast between the prayerful, abandoned churches of the past and the tackiness of the present could not be starker.

That is not to say that The Great Beauty, deeply Catholic film though it is, is positive about the Church, who are depicted as having vacated the public square almost entirely. The major institutional figure that Jep encounters is Cardinal Bellucci, a curial figure and papabile who responds to Jep’s anguished reaching out by lapsing into reveries about a regional dish. The church has often in history sacrificed the care of souls for worldly ends, but there is something piteous about doing so not for power or access but for a ligurian rabbit delicacy. Politics and society are hardly better off either, his Communist friend has a dozen household employees while his immaculately dressed neighbour turns out to be a mafia boss.

Jep himself is certainly not in denial. This is made clearest immediately after he demolishes the self created myths of one of his circle, Stefania, who has been lecturing the others about the youth of Italy having no sense of vocation. After describing in minute detail her flaws he says that this only makes her exactly the same as everyone else in their circle - all their lives are in tatters, they all can do nothing to alleviate this but joke around - the only difference between them is she does not recognise her own failure. He also has the intelligence to know that repeating the past is impossible, he tells his friend and agent Romano that he is only adapting a work of D'Annunzio, a desperate attempt to make it in the artistic world, because he thinks that others are better than him but he is wrong and should instead write something of his own, a task that Jep of course has found impossible for decades. Recognising the scale of a problem does not necessarily mean you are much closer to a solution.
 
Any film about Rome is necessarily a film about this weight of history and beauty, and the Great Beauty, set in late middle age, shows the judgement that comes if you can not escape this arriving, like in a mafia film, for Jep’s circle. One at a time they find the life they are living to be unsustainable, Romano after the disappointing reception of his play and sick of being used by his much younger girlfriend returns to his hometown, Viola after her disturbed son commits suicide by car crash donates all her possessions to the Church and becomes a missionary in Africa, while Ramona, the ageing stripper with whom he establishes a paradoxically chaste sexual relationship with, a relationship of a tenderness that is perhaps only possible because she knows she is about to die, succumbs to her illness.

What is notable here is that Rome, the city, is the cause of their malaise, to save themselves they must leave it. On some level Jep must have long known this but been unwilling to save himself, hence why he for so long refused his editors request to do a story on the Costa Concordia, but his specific crisis too is sparked by a reminder of the life he could have had outside the city when the husband of his teenage girlfriend travels to Rome to tell Jep that she only ever loved him. None of this means Sorrentino is an embittered provincial, it is clear in fact that he loves Rome deeply, every scene is a tribute to the glistening beauty of the city. But the point is that this comes at a great cost. This is why at the beginning of the film Jep says that the tourists are the best inhabitants of Rome, because they have to leave, they are nourished but not consumed by this beauty.

It is not a coincidence then that Jeps salvation too comes from outside of Rome, when his editor arranges a meeting with an impossibly old nun nicknamed the saint, who is returning to Rome after many years of charity work in africa. We are trained by all that we have seen so far, by all that we know about holy men and women, to view her as a fraud, who uses a public image of poverty to accumulate wealth and a public screen of humility to service her own pride. This is no doubt what Jep too expects, but Sorrentino plays it straight, disarming him and us, for she genuinely does lead a life of self abnegation, she has no interest at all in providing the interview Jep’s editor wants, in fact she is more interested in interviewing Jep.  She read the human apparatus and wants to know why he has not written another. He tells her that he was looking for the great beauty, and to this the saint says that she only eats roots, because roots are important.

What this means is finding the beauty in the quotidian, looking again with eyes of innocence at the things we have come to take for granted. Notably it is the third piece of conceptual art Jep reviews, an artist who has taken a picture of themselves everyday of their lives, that moves him to tears. It is neither straining for grandeur nor retreating into stupefaction, rather it quietly speaks to what it is to be human across every time and place. Appropriately this scene is accompanied, as at other moments of inspiration, by a string quartet piece by Vladimir Martynov titled for the beatitudes, perhaps the perfect distillation of the properly humanistic virtues that make up our roots. These words of the saint ultimately inspire Jep to finally go to the Costa Concordia, which provides us with a more Felliniesque image than any of the debauched parties in the form of this hulking monster emerging from the sea. Unlike Marcello though Jep does not turn away, instead he finally finds his inspiration.

Recalling his flirtation with Elisa, the girl who never stopped loving him, he declares that his new novel will begin with the life that is underneath the bla bla bla. Then, somewhat enigmatically, he says that it is only a trick. Is this referring to this newfound purpose? To understand we must recall that these words have already been uttered, by a friend who Jep encounters rehearsing his act which makes a 3d giraffe disappear. Jep asks how this can be done, and they reply with ‘it is only a trick’. The giraffe is not disappearing at all, so it is indeed a trick, but it is not disappearing because it is a hologram, it was never really there to disappear. That is, the trick is the projection of it in the first place. So too with life, the chatter, the bla bla bla, the sorrow and the fear, we either invest it with meaning or we believe that it exists in place of meaning, but that is a mistake, like with the giraffe, these are the meaningless froth that hides the meaning.

Thus society's current consensus is exactly inverted; we are not tricking ourselves into thinking life is meaningful, we are tricking ourselves into thinking it is meaningless in order to bear the fact that our own lives in tatters. But for Jep, the city of Rome and the nation of Italy the harms of doing this can not be overstated, for by drowning in the manmade cheap beauty that surrounds them they slowly become blind to the great, divine, beauty that alone can sustain.