Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Jep Gambardella has seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades, but after his 65th birthday and a shock from the past, Jep looks past the nightclubs and parties to find a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.
Sorrentino's The Great Beauty is a visually ravishing meditation on aging, memory, and the seductive emptiness of Roman high society. Toni Servillo's performance as Jep Gambardella is one of the decade's finest — world-weary, charismatic, and deeply melancholic. The cinematography by Luca Bigazzi is genuinely exceptional, bathing Rome in golden light and dreamlike imagery that rivals Fellini's finest work. Its novelty is high: while it consciously evokes 8½, its voice — the baroque parties, the savage satire of the Italian intelligentsia, the sudden sublime — is unmistakably Sorrentino's own. The plot, however, is episodic to a fault; it meanders rather than builds, relying on mood and vignette over narrative momentum. The ending, while poetic, feels somewhat inevitable and slightly underpowered given the grandeur of what precedes it.