Review of The Great Beauty (2013) by Eric H — 15 Jan 2014

Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty blasts off from its very first plunge into the social stew of contemporary Rome, conscientiously reinventing Fellini's La Dolce Vita for the 21st century and nailing the city's chattering leisure class to the wall for all time.

There's little sense in trying to resist the film's relentless boogie-woogie party vibe, its tumultuous visual banquet, its unpredictable sense of switchblade satire, its fools' parade of modern grotesques, or its river of startling melancholy, turning from a wary trickle to a flash flood by film's end.

Sorrentino's vision is the size of Rome itself, and his confidence is dazzling. The Great Beauty is also one of the greatest films about modern social dissolution, an epic art-film subgenre that may well have begun with Fellini's classic more than a half-century ago, and never gets old.

The Great Beauty will entrance you by the quiet, understated cinematography (by Luca Bigazzi), which again strikes a callback to Fellini's work, and other 1960s auteurs. For two hours and twenty minutes, you follow a camera as it creeps behind or around figures; as it moves slowly, or sometimes if it simply stays still, demanding of us that we learn to slow down in this rapid age, and watch.

Like a dream, when you wake, not everything that you've experienced will be clearly understood; but thankfully, unlike your own rich, confusing visions, you can return to this film as many times as we like.

There is no doubt The Great Beauty deserves all the recognition it gets.