The Great Beauty

142 minutes • 2013 • 7.8

Jep Gambardella is a promising author with an award-winning debut novel. That was the one. Since then, his life has been socialist and art journalism. In his 65th year, he still surrounds jetsetters, life-threatening aristocrats, wannabe artists and decadent clerics, in a slight intoxication of gin & tonic, but he is occasionally revived in meetings with ascetic Sister Maria, the stripper Ramona and a friend who reveals that his wife never stopped loving Jep.

Death and life joints are recurring in La grande bellezza - The Great Beauty, and Sorrentino deliberately refers to Fellini and Antonioni's modernist masterpieces. The film lives up to its degree to its title: Photographer Bigazzi's Rome is dazzlingly beautiful; a melancholy beauty in stark contrast to human folly.