Rome seems to be a city that can be written down forever. It always has stories, and sometimes even if the stories are few, there are scenery, history, culture, beauty, and of course despair and decadence. Although Rome shown in the Italian film "The Great Beauty" was criticized by Italians for being filmed for foreigners, many fictional plots could not stand up to the scrutiny of reality, but aside from these, you can watch it. The structure of the film is to serve the inner quality it wraps. It seems to want to express a kind of loneliness and hopelessness in the soul. This kind of loneliness and hopelessness has already escaped the objective situation, like a nihilistic and pessimistic. , the subjective performance of decisiveness.
It is undeniable that the form of the film is too huge and dazzling. The photography, lighting, and composition are all very elegant. The lens vocabulary and aesthetic angle have also reached a certain height. There is a suspicion that the form of expression overrides the specific content. Ornamental, it calmly and broadly gathers the imprints of literature, drama, architecture, sculpture, painting, music and other art categories left in Rome, and reproduces all these organically in the language of light and shadow. When watching, it is inevitable to sigh. A balanced beauty that crosses the ages, integrates audio-visual, and integrates various arts into one.
Indeed, this time Paolo Sorrentino has given his most ambitious film since filming. He uses a rich and wide-angle language to re-deconstruct an ancient and modern city, and his imitation of Fellini has arrived. A certain "realm", that is, it can be seen everywhere, and the list goes on. From the narrative structure to the use of religious and circus elements in the film, Fellini's shadow is everywhere.
The whole film is full of narrative techniques such as metaphors and symbols, and also scattered with paragraphs that are either hesitant or self-evident, so that the powerlessness of modern human beings is invisible in the face of the greatness left by history. On a passionate and decadent night in Rome, 65-year-old writer and journalist Jab Gambardella is in the middle, everyone is drunk, and he is drunk, as if the mind and body have been destroyed from the inside out, since he was 26 years old From the beginning of stepping into this city, it will be old this year. He has seen through the essence of this city and the people who live here, but he is unable to change anything. He has witnessed the false emptiness and decadence of people. It was because he saw too much that he lost the courage to break away. "We are all on the verge of despair. All we can do is take care of each other, accompany each other, and make jokes." , tore off that layer of pretentious fig leaf, and directly displayed the helplessness and ugliness of reality.
Some people criticized the film for using too many people with bad appearance to appear at various parties, as if to show a kind of ugliness, which seems to be intentional in the film to express subjective thinking. Italians consider themselves to be dedicated to the world of fashion and pizza. The film says that in Rome, "in less than a week you will be beaten." And Wilde said: "Fashion is a kind of ugliness, and we can't stand it. so that it has to be replaced every six months.” Therefore, in order to cover up their ugliness, people do not hesitate to disguise themselves with falsehoods. Even young nuns will seek cosmetic surgery help because their hands are too sweaty.
After Jabil published his first book as a young man, he could never write another novel, and when the seemingly dying saint Mary asked him why he stopped writing, he replied, "I am looking for more. Beautiful things, but I didn't find them." In the process of searching, although Jabil was smart and sociable, he could not appreciate better things. Even though he had become the darling of Rome, he couldn't find his eighteen-year-old girlfriend with him. The kind of beauty shown to him in front of the lighthouse, the dazzling Rome gave him "The Great Beauty", and he was numb and wasted in this beauty.
Jabil's large monologue at the end of the film seems to represent the feelings of many people who have gone through the world but have a difficult heart at the beginning. Along with the footage advancing along the river, the meaning of the words seems to be flowing - "Usually the end of things is death, but First of all, there will be life, lurking in this and that, and I can’t say enough. In fact, it has already settled in the noise. Silence is emotion, love is fear, beautiful light, wild and impermanent, those who are hard, miserable and painful. Human nature is buried under the embarrassment of being a human being. I can't say enough. It's just flashy clouds and smoke. I don't care about flashes. So...this is the beginning of the novel, and in the end...it's just a trick, yes, It's just a trick."
(magazine commission)
View more about The Great Beauty reviews
