Following the "Big Star" in 2011, Italian director Paulo Sorrentino moved to the United States and collaborated with Sean Penn on "Vengeance for Father". In 2013, Sorrentino returned to Rome and once again Together with Tony Severo, filmed the film "A Beautiful City". At the 86th Academy Awards, the film defeated the highly acclaimed Danish film "The Hunt" and won the best foreign language film award. After William Wheeler's "Roman Holiday", Fellini's "Roman Style Painting", Woody Allen's "Love in Rome" and many other films about Rome, what Sorrentino will show us What kind of Rome? In 142 minutes, "The Beautiful City" presents ten nights in Rome, one sightseeing trip, two salons, three parties, one dinner, one wedding, two funerals, one religious ceremony, one Performance art and interviews hitting the wall, a striptease show, a micro plastic surgery, a grand night tour of ancient Rome, a photo exhibition, an arrest, four kinds of deaths, three answers to one question, mediocre daily life, and a novel The beginning.
Or maybe "The Beautiful City" is about a wandering, we follow in the footsteps of Jep (Jep Gambardella), starting from the reporter's 65th birthday party, walking past the San Sabina Sanctuary and the Sacheti Palace , Aqueduct Park, Piazza Navona, Venola Cemetery, Ministry of Malta, Capitoline Museum, Barberini Palace, Villa Medici, National Museum of Etruscans, Baths of Caracalla, visited Most of the city of Rome finally set sail and came to the deep blue sea that he often dreamed about-the coast of Tuscany when he was 18 years old. On the Tiber River, the night lights went out, and Rome ushered in a new day.
Or is it a modern novel from the end, full of grand and exquisite intertextuality. The foreword and the postscript are Celina’s "Long Night Walk", and the opening is Breton’s question "Who am I". The director Guido who was asked about his next work is Marcello, who is indulging in extravagance, Ulysses who has returned to his hometown after ten years of drifting at sea, and Marcel who finally started writing. But in the final analysis, it was Sorrentino's Jeep Gambadler.
1. Two-sided Rome-the meeting of dark night and dawn
As Celina said, life is a journey, time has brought Jeep through 65 years of passion and decadence, and ancient Rome has gone through a long journey of thousands of years, and also traveled to the moment of our life-modernity. At the end of Fellini's "Roman Style Painting", young motorcycle teams clamored through the night of Rome, shaking the camera quickly passing the ancient statues and buildings of Rome, the light and shadow flickered, and Rome was just like this roar. Towards the future. What kind of future? In "A Beautiful City", with the sound of cannons and the female aria of Paula Fountain, the camera smoothly skids through the early morning in Rome, and with the face with heavy makeup and a weird howl, we are drawn in like this Luxurious night in modern Rome.
Parmenides divides the world into two sides. In "A Beautiful City", the world is also divided into two sides, the most luxurious decadence and serene daily life, the grand carnival and the forbearing grief, the morning and the night, they are finally When they meet together at dawn, some fall asleep, others are about to wake up, and this divided world is originally a whole. This city once had a glorious ancient civilization, but in modern times it is known for its fashion and luxury. Grand feasts and events are always being staged. Rome in "Top Secret City" is a holy place of ancient civilization in the hearts of tourists from all over the world. It is a luxurious party and boring salon of the upper class. It is a kitsch and empty show of modern art. It is also the daily routine of ordinary Romans. Romano said that Rome had let him down, and Jeep said that the best people in Rome were tourists. On a night in Rome, the bereaved Alfred and his girlfriend would drink some red wine, watch TV for a while and then go to bed, the striptease club manager Egidio would work until six in the morning, and Jeep would Drink and revel until dawn at a luxurious party.
The glorious ancient civilization exudes a decadent breath, and a grand feast is being staged next to the ancient Roman Colosseum, full of false, emptiness and decadence. In the world of rich widows and cardinals, people idly indulge in high places, where comics are staged in the high places, a serious place reveals absurdity, but the carnival place reveals the most desperate pain, we seem to be able to watch the feast. Jeep saw Sorrentino's eyes behind him. In addition to the grand feast of the upper class and the splendid ancient Roman civilization, Sorrentino also showed us the real and daily Rome. In the transition of the shots of "City of Extinction", we can always catch a glimpse of the lives full of mediocrity, triviality, joy and sorrow, which fills the city of Rome day and night. The camera passed the Roman man washing his face by the Paula fountain, and the middle-aged woman leaning against the statue reading a newspaper with a cigarette in her mouth. In the early morning, the Romans practiced and walked their dogs by the Tiber River. In the monastery, the nuns and children played hide-and-seek. Elisa, who always loved Jeep, finally chose to spend her life with an ordinary man. The two old men faced the separation of their lovers. Passing relative weeping at the top of the stairs.
There are stories in the city of Rome all the time. If Sorrentino uses Jeep's footsteps to measure the time and space of Rome, then the city is filled with many different bodies and faces. As many tragedies are uninterrupted, everyone is the protagonist of a tragedy. From the hideous close-up of a woman with heavy makeup and colorful makeup at the opening party, to the end of the credits, the face of Jeep’s monologue gradually disappears in the darkness. During the period, a disappointed Romano flashes, a little girl splashed with paint and weeping, and a red-painted Andre. (Andrea), a nobleman playing cards like a zombie in the palace, and a dead-looking young woman in the lengthened car. The female body from the male perspective is particularly prominent in the film. The body of the performer who hits the wall becomes an empty symbolic show, the body of the little girl who performs painting becomes a tool for money, and the body of the saint becomes the background for taking pictures. The empty self-defeating, either transformed into a doll or reduced to a discourse tool, is unable to speak for itself. They are like symbols of the dark night of Rome, constantly undergoing destruction and blasphemy, the past and the present are slowly exhausted, and the future seems to never come. However, there are other moments in Rome, different faces, Vernarina under Raphael's brush radiating light in the dark, innocent girls in the monastery laughing, saints still dragging their old bodies on the holy steps... …It is precisely that all these scattered but rich individual lives merge into a flowing Rome, telling about the beauty and ugliness, tranquility and madness of this city. These beings flocked the city of Rome through the long river of history, and then walked towards the future in the dawn of the sky.
2. The beauty of beauty is gone-the painful fable
of modern art. At the end of the 19th century, Nietzsche’s critique of modern art echoed for more than a century: "Modern art exposes this universal poverty: people imitate all great creative times and geniuses in vain. Collect all the "world literature" around modern people to comfort him, put him among the artistic styles and artists of the past, so that he can name them like Adam named animals; but he is still an eternal hungry, a A desperate'critic', an Alexandrian library character, a librarian and proofreader in his bones, poorly blinded by book dust and typographical errors."
Therefore, for tourists who suffer from Stendhal Syndrome and take pictures constantly, for female performance artists who hit the wall, for Romano who is unable to seek for it, and for 42-year-old stripper who is terminally ill. For the rich widow’s son Andre, for an ignorant actress who wants to write a novel and want to be a director, for a 104-year-old saint who only eats plant roots, for a 40-year-old indulgence in high society For Jeep, what is beauty?
Sorrentino made a strong mockery of the emptiness and kitsch in modern art through Jeep's mouth. Modern art, which has been deeply corroded by consumerism, is full of mystery and hysteria. Everyone claims to be an artist, and it becomes the fashion of modern society to talk about Shakespeare and Proust. "There is no era when people talk about art so much and respect so little." The performance artist with sickles and hammers painted on her genitals and hitting her head against the wall disdainfully said that she never reads, and she can't tell what it is. "Resonance", but more concerned about the gossip about having sex with her boyfriend eleven times a day. She is easily reminiscent of Abranovic, and body symbols have become an important feature of modern art. The other painted body becomes a cash cow for parents. The painting girl cries and beats the canvas, while the upper class numbly entertains the show. The flurry of modern art and the popularity of consumerism have gradually faded all the beauty, and death is slowly approaching. Eliza passed away, Ramona was killed by a terminal illness, Andre chose to leave this world, and the holiness and beauty still left in the world was a 104-year-old saint and a little girl who painted, but they all became The puppet of modern society. The world seemed to have fallen into the abyss of eternal misfortune, and Andre shouted: I have a problem, but the indulgence of sensual pleasure thinks this is just a madman, Sorrentino's allegory of modern society is undoubtedly painful.
However, when everyone is living and dreaming of death in an optimistic world, who will be the bell-ringer, who will be the Faust who shouts, "Should I not bring the only pornographic film in my life with the infatuation of nostalgia"? This is an era that is more nostalgic than romanticism, but it has fallen more thoroughly, and even the hungry people who have not absorbed it can no longer recall the longer past. The deformed face with heavy makeup at the beginning of the movie is the true face of modern society.
Perhaps it is Romano who is still looking for "beauty", but he is always lost in the search and goes astray. Romano believed that art should be taken seriously. He adapted Deng Nanzhao, but he was unable to express his true feelings in words. Forty years later, Romano chose to leave disappointedly, leaving behind his last farewell to Rome: "I spent the entire summer preparing for September, and there is no further plan. Now, my summer is used to remember, Those goodwill that have passed away are partly due to burnout and partly due to carelessness. What's so bad about nostalgia? This is the only pastime that people who have no faith in the future can give. Without rain, August will end, and September will return. It hasn’t started, and I’m so ordinary, but I don’t need to worry, it’s okay, I’ll be fine.” Romano’s final performance still did not win the love of his lover, but inadvertently moved the audience with his true feelings.
However, just like Sorrentino’s hope for the city of Rome, modern art fell into a deep valley in hysteria, but beauty still bursts at many moments when it intersects with living life. The photo wall of the National Museum of Etruscan shows us In the real moments of daily life, real faces become written text, individual existence presents endless diversity in the passage of time, and civilization memory and modern life meet on a flat wall. At the end of the film, the 104-year-old saint looks at the flamingo flying into the distance. The camera falls on the smiling face, dry and old, but it is the original appearance of life. The city of Rome is like a grand Palimpsest. It is always open, and countless people come to identify those historical marks that may or may not appear, and new writing is being staged and is always expected.
3. Delayed nostalgics-how to start writing again?
The protagonists of Sorrentino films are often masked modern life individuals, such as the rock singer in "Vengeance for the Father", the accountant in "The Result of Love", with the melancholy and ridicule of world-weary people, and human beings. Those greed and indifference are living in the world, and the absurd or chaotic reality reveals the emptiness and embarrassment of life at all times. Life loses its texture and meaning, but is finally given a moment of breakthrough. Jeep also in "A Beautiful City" So it is. Jeppe became famous in the literary world with a novella at the age of 25. He came to Rome at the age of 26, indulging in the luxury of high society. Forty years passed in a flash, and the 65-year-old Jeep was no longer the young man from Naples. He finally realized his youth's desire to become the king of the upper class. Jeep lives next to the Colosseum, and plays with various VIP parties. His female companions change frequently, and his name is often published in gossip newspapers. He is well acquainted with all the survival rules of the upper class, from the game rules of luxury parties to the performance skills at funerals. He can no longer describe a true emotion and cannot answer "Who am I?"
Just like Fellini's "Eight Parts" In "Half" Guido is always entangled with a question: What is your next work? Jeep, who has been on pen for 40 years, is also constantly facing other people's questions: Why not continue to write? Jeep can always give different answers. He said to Ramona the stripper, "Because I always go out to play at night. Rome will waste too much time and be distracting, and writing requires concentration and quiet." This answer was not approved by Ramona. Jepp blamed his lack of inspiration for not writing. Facing the saints, Jeep replied, "I wanted to find something better, but I didn’t find it." Half a drunk, Jeep looked at the crazy people at the party and said to the maid who took care of him: "They Asked me for many years, why I no longer write a novel, but look at these people, this savage life, this is my life, nothing."
What is writing? Jeep comforted the widowed Alfred that "writing is nothing more than turning life into hallucinations, imaginations, and lies." Writers such as Stet and Turgenev take it too seriously and put Flaubert's unfinished "Bovar and Pecuchet" on their lips. Just like Ulysses drifting outside, enjoying the easy life with the goddess Calypso, while thinking about his hometown endlessly, Jeep is a wandering nostalgia who lingers in the upper class. Nostalgia (nostalgia), composed of the Greek roots νόστος (hometown) and άλγος (pain), originally meant the pain of not being able to return to the hometown. With the rapid development of industrial civilization, the idyllic homeland life is gone forever. Nostalgia means The pain of losing the pre-modern civilization has become one of the important symptoms of modern society. Accompanying nostalgia is endless wandering and mocking reality. In the ancient civilization and art of Jeep wandering in Rome for thousands of years at midnight, the memories of youth often flash back before falling into a dream. In the face of the great works of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Proust, Flaubert, and the fragmented life of the moment, all the good will be gone, and everything around me is dying. Is a true writing Is it possible? Jeep asked himself, "Flaubert wanted to write a book that says nothing, but he failed. Can I do it?" Like Hamlet who couldn't bear the burden, Jeep fell into disdainful ridicule and endless delay. "I'm just a world-weary", he mocks everything in front of him humorously, and "humor puts the self, the world, and the various relationships between the self and the world in a suspected position." Jeep sang song every night. Zhongyan watched the passing of life, but could not open the future.
But as Kundera asked: "Heavy is really cruel, and light is really beautiful?... The heaviest burden has also become the image of the strongest vitality. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives are to the earth, It is more real. On the contrary, when the burden is completely absent, people will become lighter than the air, they will float, and they will be far away from the earth and life on the earth, and people are just a semi-real existence, and their movements are also It will become free and meaningless.” () Jeep chose flashy, but gradually lost its weight. This lightness can no longer even squeeze traces in the text of life. However, triviality, aging, parting and death may be temporarily forgotten, but they will not disappear from anyone's life. Jeep told Ramona that she should never cry at the funeral, as it would overwhelm the grief of her relatives, but he lost his way at Andre's funeral. Jeep, who would never drink too mad at a party, finally got drunk and shook his body with a wine glass and asked, "Who am I?"
Maybe there is an awakening to ask questions before writing can begin. Roland Barthe has repeatedly pointed out the relationship between the writer and the world, "A writer is a person who thoroughly accommodates the world’s why in a way to write. And miracles—if you can say that, it’s this kind of narcissism. The activities of history along the path of a century of literature constantly arouse a question of the world: while the writer shuts himself up in how to write, he finally rediscovered this question is very open: what is the world's existence for? What is the meaning of things? In short, it was precisely when the writer's work became his own goal that he rediscovered a characteristic of centering adjustment: the writer conceived literature as a goal, and the world repaid this goal as a means. He. It is in this infinite disappointment that the writer rediscovered the world, a weird century, because literature reproduces the world as a question, and never finally reproduces it as an answer. "The world has no answer. Literature does not provide answers. Jeep, who spent countless hours in Vanity Fair, began to rethink the world and himself. The moment his writing started, he was hidden in doubt and questioning.
What always summons this destined sensitive writer, if it is the youth of his youth, it is better to say that the life itself is full of embarrassment and the desire to write, as well as Dostoevsky and Pruss. The call to this nostalgic by former writers such as Te, Flaubert and Breton. In "Eight and a half" Guido committed suicide at the movie conference, and in "Sweet Life" Marcello finally chose to fall into the abyss in the extravagant and boring life. However, as Breton, who is well-known to Jeep, said " Beauty is convulsive, otherwise there will be no beauty.” () After spending countless years of depression, under the impact of aging and death, Jeep can finally face all the moments in his life.
In the torrent of time and the fate of death, life will eventually disappear, but it may not necessarily play the weak. Just like Jeep’s monologue at the end of the film: "Usually things end is death, but first there is life, hidden in this and that, and I can’t say enough. In fact, they have already settled in the noise. Silence is emotion, love It's also fear. The beautiful light is wild and impermanent. The human nature of hardship, misery and pain is buried under the embarrassment of being born, and I can't say it...there are nothing but glitz and clouds." Remembrance is like water. At the end of his years, Marcel chose to write to fight the erosion of time. Bouvard and Peguchet described by Flaubert did not complete their encyclopedia, but explained the emptiness itself in futile writing, drifting on the sea for several years. Ulysses finally returned to his hometown of Itaca, and at the end of "The Beautiful City", Jeep sailed out to sea 40 years later and came to the Tuscan lighthouse that he often dreamed of. The memory was fully narrated. The moment of may be the beginning of writing the future. The "shyness and melancholy" of love in life and all the embarrassment of being born seem to be bearable, so he finally decided to start writing again.
4. Conclusion
How to start again is the question raised by "The Beautiful City". Facing a beautiful era that cannot be returned and the fragmented present, Jepp is faced with how to start writing again, while facing the once glorious ancient Roman civilization, modern Rome is faced with how to move into the future. Is it to be a nostalgic who is stagnant or a forward who writes life? Just as Debussy's "The Sunken Church" waited for the church to surface again after the fog dissipated, the church bells and female arias in "A Beautiful City" always call the city and wait for her to wake up. Who can wake it up, Sorrentino still gave the answer, and Rome is there, waiting for the moment when all lives will reunite with it.
Celina’s "Long Night Walk" ended when the sky was getting dark, the night lights went out, and the dawn of a new day ushered in. "In the distance, the tugboat honked its whistle, and its yelling passed over one arch after another. The ship lock, and then over another bridge, the farther and farther... It must call all the barges on the river, call the whole city, call the sky and the countryside, call us, it will call everything Take away, take the Seine away, so that everyone no longer talks about all these things." "The Beautiful City" borrows the scene from "Long Night Walk" at the end, and the saint seems to reinject the city with a single breath. In order to gain vitality, the flock of birds flew over the Colosseum and flew over the city of Rome. Swimmers jumped into the Tiber River, the morning clock rang, the night lights went out, and Rome ushered in a new day. Looking slowly on the ancient Tiber River, crossing stone bridges one after another, the early Romans were doing morning exercises on the bank and walking their dogs, and the nuns from afar took a group photo on the bridge. The film was finally fixed on the Ponte Sant'Angelo and the platform. St. Peter's Basilica by the Bo River. Different from the cloud-like montage advancing in the opening film, the slow motion long shot at the end gives the narrative an uninterrupted forward attitude. The history, present and oncoming future of Rome are placed in a complete time and space. Sorrenty Nuo used the familiar river jumping, morning bell, dawn and marching, etc., which are familiar to the city of Rome, and placed infinite hope for the future of the city.
Breton commented on beauty in "Naga": "Beauty is not static, that is to say, enclosed in its'stone dream', lost in the shadow of those'maids', lost in those who claim to be only The deepest part of the tragedy that tells the story of a day is not dynamic, that is to say, it is completely at the mercy of a crazy running, after it, it starts to run like crazy again, which means that it is more frivolous than a snowflake in the snow. , In other words, make up your mind and never be embraced." Sorrentino’s “extreme beauty” gave life to life in fragmentation, light and shadow passing the silence of the ancient Roman sculpture in the night, and in blue. There are waves on the sea, it follows in Jeep's footsteps watching the prosperity and loneliness of the city, roaming one after another grand feast, listening to the laughter and crying in the depths of the silence. Just as "beauty is neither static nor dynamic, the beauty in my eyes is just as I see you." This is the beautiful city of Rome in Sorrentino's eyes.
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