La Grande Bellezza [The Great Beauty] **** (2013, Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli) – Movie Review

Toni Servillo stars as journalist Jep Gambardella, who after his 65th birthday looks back over enjoying the years of nightclubs and parties nightlife of Rome and discovers a timeless landscape of perennial great beauty. Now that’s a plot you don’t get in many thrillers or Hollywood blockbusters, or even little indie movies.

It’s a movie love letter to the Eternal City and a sentimental salute to a glorious past, time enjoyably spent and temps perdu. And it’s a film poem about the days of wine and roses, love, friendship, good food, great conversation, laughs and martini, against a backdrop of fantastic views of Italy, one of the places of greatest beauty in the world.

It’s a subtle film with a meaning that is ultimately tantalising and elusive but you always get the drift as it dazzles you with its glorious images. I must give an honourable mention to Luca Bigazzi’s amazing cinematography, winner of the Italian Golden Globe for Best Cinematography (Migliore Fotografia), and Lele Marchitelli’s beautiful original score.

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino’s dazzling, sweetly reflective artwork film is one of haunting great beauty too, provoking thought and admiration as you let it all wash over you for two hours 20 minutes, with its remarkable, sometimes startling images. Made in the great tradition of art films of old, it requires your attention and brain and imagination, and demands your respect and admiration, rewarding them all copiously. It can’t help bringing Federico Fellini and especially La Dolce Vita to mind, but of course that’s a good thing.

Jep says: ‘We’re all on the brink of despair, all we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little… Don’t you agree?’

One of 2013’s great movies, it won for Italy the Oscar, Golden Globe and Bafta for Best Foreign Language Film and was London Critics Circle nominated. It was also nominated as Film of the Year by the London Film Critics.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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