Review of The Great Beauty (2013) by Jeanrenoir — 19 Feb 2014

A gorgeous non-linear poem of a movie. Obviously an update of La Dolce Vita, showing how much further into decadence and shallowness the upper classes of Italy (and the globalized world?) have descended in the last fifty years or so.

But also a film about the possibility of transcendence of the whole farce of the emptiness of the lives of the rich. The final tracking shot of the gorgeous Tiber River and its bridges, accompanied by profoundly beautiful, soulful music epitomizes the capacity of the human mind to move to a very different plane from that on which the film's hero wastes most, but not all, of his time on earth.