La grande bellezza – The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino – 2013)

This movie is a portrait of the lifestyle and human attitude that is typical of Roman society: decadent, indolent and insolent - if you allow me to express these words also in English.

Sorrentino gives us fantastic, charming, captivating photographs of Rome. From the sparkling colors of Jep’s funkiest parties, to the shaded tones of the river and the city’s architecture during his solitary walks at late dawns, to the warm bright light of its villas and parks, to the deep darkness of ancient temples.

This movie has no specific plot, if you are looking for one. This movie unrolls scenes of roman life, through thoughts, images, characters, looks, emotions, surprises, memories, dreams and hopes, failures and disappointment, laughs and cries, that only the smartness of Jep Gambardella (main character interpreted by an extraordinary Toni Servillo) can explain.

Jep Gambardella is celebrating his 65th birthday with a party. He is a journalist who wrote his first very successful but only book long time ago. The question was “what do you like the most? To this question all my friends would answer ‘the pussy’, instead my answer was ‘ the smell of the house of old people’.. from this I knew I was destined to sensitivity”. Jep is our storyteller, the one able to lead us to give a sense to all this apparent nonsense, revealing THE GREAT BEAUTY of being human.