The Great Beauty (2012)
The last movie on my list is that of an Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘The Great Beauty.’ In short, this movie is about the main character Jeb Gambardella and his search for great beauty. After writing one novel and spending much of his life partying and living lavish Roman nightlife, he goes through the midlife crisis and sees little value in his superficial life as a Roman Socialite. He then decided to find meaning to his existence and finally find the great beauty he searched for his whole life.
The whole film has a dream-like quality. Each scene is stunning, and each conversation seems to be very well-staged. Overall, nothing feels natural in this movie, and that is one of its best parts. The imagery of Rome and its nightlife is fascinating, and the fact that it was shot in the Italian language also makes the whole movie enjoyable.
The movie shows the upper class of Roman society. It is very explicit in parties and the everyday life of Roman socialites. However, The Great Beauty never fails to show how superficial the whole high life of Roman society is for Jeb. The parody of the artist Marina Abramovic, the vast line of people waiting for the plastic surgeon’s appointment, and the pretentious people among the high-class Romans only show how meaningless and mundane life is from Jeb’s point of view. His life only had a meaning when he was in love, and that is when he wrote his first book.
The Great Beauty begins with Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s quote from the Journey to the End of the Night, which is the following: “Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It’s a novel, simply a fictitious narrative.” This particular quote is very important as it is connected to the conclusion Jeb makes by the end of the movie. Jeb finally reflects on life and says that “this is how it always ends. With death. But first, there was life. Hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah. It is all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world… blah, blah, blah.” However, despite a very existentialist tone in his final monologue, Jeb continues and says: “Beyond there is what lies beyond. I don’t deal with what lies beyond. Therefore...Let this novel begin.” The ending, once again, can be open to interpretation. However, I firmly believe that this particular monologue suggests that Jeb finally goes on with his life and finds new meaning to it. In one of the scenes, he is asked why he has not written a second novel, to which he responds that he has been looking for the great beauty, but he was unable to find it. The ending monologue is an integral part of the film, and it wraps up the whole story, which initially began with Celine’s quote. Jeb repeats that life “is a trick,” which is entirely accurate. As Celine stated, beyond Travel and journeys, life is a complete disappointment. People can never find something in the real world so abstract as, for instance, great beauty. In the end, Jeb realizes that great beauty comes in ‘inconsistent flashes.’ As he begins his monologue, he is seen traveling to the exact location where he first had a sexual encounter with the love of his life. The site is right next to the lighthouse, and as Jeb goes on with his monologue, we see the flashes of the lighthouse illuminating on his face time after time. That is a great beauty; it does not come in one form as it is illuminating itself to individuals time after time. Once Jeb finally realizes that he finds peace in the mundanity of life and starts writing his second novel.
I often struggle to explain why I love this movie. I generally never get bored of it, and I watch it as often as I can because I always find something exciting and new. I first watched it after my short trip to Italy in February of 2020. I was supposed to visit my friends, but the spike of Covid-19 cases forced me to leave the country and go back to Georgia. Upon my return home, I watched The Great Beauty after my friend recommended it to me. Watching it did not make up for my canceled plans in Italy, but it was still an enjoyable experience. In a desperate time of the pandemic and never-ending lockdown, watching this movie was an escape. I did learn many things from it, and the conclusion of this film just made me contemplate many aspects of life that I had never thought about before. This particular movie is last on my list, and I believe it is a significant ending to my archive. Just as Celine says, “Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue.” Watching a movie is really some form of Travel, as this experience helps us grow by experiencing journeys we would otherwise never experience in our lives (only if we let them). I feel fortunate to be born in such a period where watching movies from different countries, directors, and decades is simple. Seeing stories written from multiple perspectives can only enrich our worldviews, and our worldviews overall shape our perceptions of identities.