By Daniel Lindvall.
“Do you know why I eat only roots? Because roots are important,” explains a 104-year-old nun to the greying author and playboy Jep Gambardella, main character of Paolo Sorrentino’s recent Oscar winner, The Great Beauty. Forty years ago Gambardella wrote the roman à clef of his generation. Then he gave up writing to become the king of the beautiful people. Every night, on his huge rooftop terrace overlooking the Colosseum, Gambardella holds court for Rome’s literati, impoverished aristocrats, glamorous kids, reality stars and gluttonous prelates from the nearby Vatican City. If there’s one thing that Gambardella and his entourage sorely lack it is roots. Among the remnants of more than 2,000 years of cultural history, they hover in an impenetrable party bubble, as out of touch with the past as with the present. They might as well have existed in a parallel universe.
The Great Beauty is obviously a satire of Italian neoliberalism, or the Berlusconi era as it is often referred to after the media mogul and politician who has long been the face of the dictatorship of superficiality, where all culture has become commercialised and politics merely another form of entertainment. In an interview included in the press kit Sorrentino himself talks about a “culture of escapism” and Silvio Berlusconi’s habit of keeping parliament waiting for him while he is occupied doing “pointless, frivolous things.” Like a skilful magician who tricks us into looking in the wrong direction at the crucial moment, Berlusconi has steered people’s focus away from important issues to trivialities.
Stylistically Sorrentino’s film swings between emotionally charged burlesque, à la Fellini, and a cooler, intellectually ironic tone that makes me think more of Peter Greenaway. Both are, to be sure, excellent sources of inspiration. The satire is, admittedly, at times bitingly grotesque. As when a little girl is forced by her art-dealing parents to perform full-body action painting for their guests during a garden party. Sobbing and covered in paint from top to toe she throws herself repeatedly at a huge canvas. “Think about your career. Europe’s leading gallery owners are all here,” her parents exhort her. Or when a botox doctor, receiving his patients in a renaissance palazzo, is treated as were he the reincarnation of Michelangelo.
The great problem with The Great Beauty, however, is that Sorrentino himself ends up doing a Berlusconi on us. He points our attention away from neoliberalism’s basic zones of conflict, towards the merely trivial. In Sorrentino’s Rome we see no trace of the real victims of neoliberalism, nor of the intensified process of exploitation that feeds the around the clock party of Gambardella & Co. The working class is largely invisible. So are the unemployed, the 35-year-olds living with their parents because they can’t afford a home of their own, the actually homeless, the undocumented immigrant street vendors, the beggars. Even the obligatory waiters and waitresses are more invisible than usual. Instead Sorrentino gives us a Rome so spruced up, so beautifully lit, so softly caressed by the camera, that large sections of the film have the feel of a commercial produced by the tourist office – and a particularly glossy one at that.
Ignoring the class struggle – the almost one-sided war on the working class that defines post-1970s politics – we get the story of neoliberalism as a struggle for the soul of the bourgeoisie, a struggle in which Jep Gambardella and his likes ultimately are shown to be victims more than anything else – victims of indolence and wealth that break down the psychological fibre of their class. Tellingly, the film is populated with multiple versions of the old “poor little rich girl”-stereotype; children and young people whose misery ultimately seems to be derived from their wealth. Thus, Sorrentino feeds the absurd myth that life is particularly difficult for those who grow up economically privileged, a notion that flies in the face of the scientific fact that higher class position statistically means a longer and, physically as well as mentally, healthier life (despite the greater risk for empathy deficiency). The one and only reason for the indestructibility of this myth is obviously that some miserable people have access to a far louder voice than others.
In sharp contrast to the unhappiness of the wealthy, the few and fragmentary working or lower middle class characters in the film are presented as almost uniformly harmonious, apparently because, thanks to their relative poverty, they have the ability to appreciate the “simple pleasures” in life. Thus Jep Gambardella’s (Latin American?) maid is really nothing else than a version of Mammy in Gone With the Wind. And when Gambardella, for plot reasons I won’t go into here, makes a brief visit to the Spartan home of an elderly couple, and asks them what their plans are for the night, the man answers – in a tone of voice indicating that he has seen the light – that his wife will finish her ironing, then they will have a glass of wine and watch some television. Hallelujah, how blessed is the simplicity of the poor!
Ultimately The Great Beauty confirms what has been apparent already in the director’s earlier films (not least in the equally overrated Il Divo) – that Paolo Sorrentino, the Neapolitan son of a banker, is as blinkered as his characters. He cannot see outside of his class, cannot understand it in relation to other classes. And this lack of context – this rootlessness – spills over to the aesthetics as well. The film ends up loose and warped. Satire gives place to sentimentality. Federico Fellini and Peter Greenaway cohabit uncomfortably. And the social criticism disappears behind the glossy pictures of a tourist brochure.
Daniel Lindvall is editor-in-chief of Film International.
The Great Beauty was released on Blu-ray and DVD by The Criterion Collection.
You write, “The Great Beauty confirms what has been apparent already in the director’s earlier films (not least in Il Divo) – that Paolo Sorrentino, the Neapolitan son of a banker, is as blinkered as his characters. He cannot see outside of his class, cannot understand it in relation to other classes. And this lack of context – this rootlessness – spills over to the aesthetics as well. The film ends up loose and warped. Satire gives place to sentimentality. Federico Fellini and Peter Greenaway cohabit uncomfortably. And the social criticism disappears behind the glossy pictures of a tourist brochure.”
And this is it exactly, and this is also why the film won the Academy Award – a dubious distinction – for Best Foreign Film – a dubious category, as well. There’s nothing really being contested here – nothing at risk. Oh, the poor! Their honesty, charity, their entertainment value!
While Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt – which was nominated for the same award – actually had something to say about the way that society prejudges people, and never forgives, The Great Beauty reminds me of the similarly reprehensible Life is Beautiful from some years back, which also won an Oscar.
Take a real situation. Sentimentalize it. Pour on the syrup. Serve it up as social criticism. People will love it.
This film sounds like another case of style being far greater than substance, if we should call it that. Recently, on rogerebert.com Matt Zoller Seitz addressed reviewers/critics about the necessity to comment on visual language as well as narrative matters (nothing but a reminder for many of us), though I hope that readers don’t take him to mean ignoring ideology too — something that goes deeper than the visual, and well addressed here. Fine job, Daniel!
Very thoughtful observations, Daniel. To paraphrase Richard Burton, I found this film bloodless, liverless, spleenless, kidneyless. I found its politics thin, false, as is its ballyhooed commitment to the art of Rome.
I second that emotion! What an awful film. A dangerous film. It is full of wrong-headed ideas about class as you note here. It is significant and more than a little creepy that a film with such politics won an Academy Award. ‘Empathy deficiency’ seems to be a widely accepted plague in current cinema, in the news, and in popular culture.
The elite have done a really good job building a myth of a class war ‘against’ the rich and privileged. How absurd. It is a total perversion and distortion of the truth and suppresses the real and measurable class struggle at the bottom and the (disappearing) middle. Disgusting, really, when you think about it.
Daniel, thanks for this piece. Respectfully, I disagree on a couple points. First, your assertion that Sorrentino paints the core, partying characters as “victims” is misguided. Above all, I think they are characters to be laughed at. The hopeless playwright with girlfriend that doesn’t begin to respect him, the priest that refuses to address a serious question, etc. Sorrentino also paints the characters as broadly lazy, contrary to an upper class characterized largely by persons who couldn’t possibly get to where they are by being lazy. I think Sorrentino is painting a broad stroke here, saying something about the modern Italian society, in addition to drawing contrasts to classes (i.e. your mention of “finishing the ironing”).
Second, I strongly disagree with your point about the “glossy pictures of a tourist brochure”. I think the type of beauty of this photography is meant to be cast in plain sight next to characters and society that is blind to it. It is in-your-face irony, just like the photo of the desensitized Jep sitting half-eyed next to a sprawling naked woman. In particular, the central irony of the story is that Jep says that he “has been looking for the great beauty” in response to why he hasn’t written another novel. Clearly, Sorrentino seems to be saying that it is right in front of him. It is not for lack of stories to be told that Jep hasn’t produced. It is Jep’s own endorphin-dripping habits and misguided mind-state as prompted by the prevailing culture.