Doing the Locomotion

Half a century ago, in La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini caught a mood of change as Italy entered the 1960s: Marcello Mastroianni played Marcello Rubini as a youngish gossip columnist who lives out a week’s succession of nights and dawns in the most spectacular of cities: Rome. Fellini’s masterpiece was a film of echoes, many of them ironic—like the famous opening scene of the sunbathing women looking up at the plaster statue of Christ being transported overhead by helicopter which, at the film’s close, is inverted with the Medusa-like stingray discovered on the beach and the angelic young girl trying to communicate across the sound of the waves with the insouciant Marcello: those were images that suggested the submerged feelings of a immense, even geological past.

Paolo Sorrentino has echoed Fellini across the years with La Grande Bellezza, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2014, even though the parallels with La Dolce Vita are so strikingly obvious as to mark it at times as plainly derivative. Jep Gambardella, played by Toni Servillo, is an ageing patrician roué with the melancholic jowls of a basset-hound: in his twenties he wrote a promising novel called The Human Apparatus, and appears to have lived out on it ever since. Indeed, Gambardella could almost be the young Marcello in his declining years. Still smitten by the desirability of the high life, sporting a permanent mask of irony, he isn’t a jot surer about what to do with his talent—which he tells himself early in the film is a kind of “sensitivity”—now that the partying is a permanent fixture. His hollow ambition, he recalls, was “not just to be part of Rome’s high life but to be its King, not just to make parties but to have the power to spoil them”. And here we are at his sixty-fifth birthday, no less. “Look at these people, this wildlife,” he exclaims. “This is my life and it’s nothing. Flaubert wanted to write a book about nothing: he didn’t succeed. So how could I do it?”

Jep doesn’t have sharpened incisors, but he is in many respects a vampire: like the rest of his kind he has successfully drained from the young the vitality lacking in his own estimate of the world, and now torments the less fortunate (and perhaps himself) with a hint of aristocratic insouciance, of days when the pleasure principle attached to a single class only. The middle-aged, as this film suggests, have a flair for hedonism: they have the money (earned at jobs that might have gone to the young) and consequently the leisure time to throng the absurd discos and art happenings that provide Sorrentino with so much rich material for satire: one woman called Talia Concept (who lives on “vibrations” as she tells an unimpressed Jed in an interview, and is surely modelled on the performance artist Marina Abramovic) bloodies her forehead by sprinting naked (except for a veil over her head) into the stone pillar of an aqueduct, another young man hosts an exhibition in which every day in his life is represented by a photo (perhaps modelled on Roman Opalka, the number-obsessed painter who took a photo of himself every day from 1968 until his death in 2011), and the prepubertal girl whose father—“the most important art collector in this miserable country”—encourages her to have expressionist tantrums with tins of paint: we are told that the canvases sell for a fortune.

The satire extends beyond the art world. In a hilarious scene in a botox clinic, “patients” wait in opulent surroundings to have their number called and go forward to receive a jab from the master’s syringe (at 700 euros a time): even a nun can be seen in the queue sitting demurely around the consulting room. About to go to bed in another scene with Orietta, an elegant forty-year-old met at a dinner party, Jep asks her what she does for a living. “I’m rich,” she replies. “Nice job,” is his rejoinder. But when she decides to show him her nude photos on her Facebook site, he slips out the back door: self-absorption has its limits, unless the ego being admired is his. Indeed, other characters in the film are paper-thin, not least the forty-two-year-old stripper who has a relationship with Jep and then disappears from the narrative (a very brief scene informs us that she has succumbed to the complications of an operation). The French actress Fanny Ardant, who once starred in an Antonioni film, enjoys a tiny cameo too, of no particular relevance to the film’s development except perhaps to remind us of a glamorous actress who has aged well (unlike Anita Ekberg, the star of Fellini’s film, who has fallen on hard times in her old age).

La Dolce Vita was in black and white; La Grande Bellezza is in sumptuous overripe cinematic colours, the camera swooping in a delightfully saccadic motion among the fountains and statues as the film opens on the city at dawn. A Japanese tourist faints (or worse) at the splendour of it all, a victim of the hyperaesthetic appreciation syndrome first described by Stendhal on his visit to the same country.

Then we see Gambardella stalking down a street in his elegant blazer and brogues with another sybaritic evening event in prospect, where he will disenchant the not yet fully disabused—he gives one “Marxist” female novelist a lesson in Schopenhauer for ignoring that her life is in tatters “like the rest of us … You should look on us with affection and not contempt.” For a short-sprint writer who turns in only occasional pieces on pretentious “performance art” events for a culture magazine whose editor is a self-possessed female dwarf with purple specs (another Fellini touch), he seems to have a very high-maintenance lifestyle, with a penthouse apartment looking over to the Colosseum and a giant Martini ad blinking into the night sky. (These houses like luxury hotels are certainly not the Rome of most people, who live in cramped and ugly apartments on the edge of the conurbation, miles away from anything that might resemble the “Fontanone” built by Pope Paul V on the Janiculum Hill, and the true star exhibit of the film’s opening.)

Gambardella’s observations as he walks along the Tiber are, we dimly gather, fragments of the second novel (the truly difficult one) he never had the courage to tackle. And could he? He is too immersed in the presence of the eternal city, so sucked into the vortex of that mysterious urban quality of Romanità once thought crucial for a papal understanding of the fleeting vanity and glory of human ambition, to construct anything resembling a coherent narrative. He is happy to give advice to others on their literary creations, like his friend Romano, who is trying to adapt D’Annunzio for the stage and maintain an expensive mistress, for he has a high degree of tolerance for human weaknesses, his own included. Especially his own. Pleasures are so much more enjoyable when they come unpredictably, even if their randomness carries the risk of allowing something more dangerous—aimlessness—to seep into a life. But Gambardella is just the kind of person to tell you decadence is actually a word to describe a highly advanced and complex state of civilisation. If salvation is out of question in this state of affairs at least a man can make himself comfortable: life doesn’t have to be a via doloroso.

Yet even though he has the keys to the city—one character even offers to take him on a tour of its hidden treasures—Jep doesn’t possess its soul. Where should he find it? It’s not as if he hasn’t been looking all these years.

One day Gambardella has an unexpected visit from the husband of a woman called Elisa who had been his girlfriend when they were young. Elisa has just died. Having calmed the pangs of mourning by reading his wife’s diary, the widower tells Jep that she had confessed in it to only ever truly loving one person: Jep. (We are never told why exactly.) The memory of this girl who loved him when they were both young and callow, and never stopped loving him, inspires him to ponder, a little more deeply, a little more nostalgically, the beauty of passing things.

Our access to the “purity” of this rather trite recollection comes through the film’s sublime score (those parts not given over to the frenetic bass-beat of the nightclubs): much of it is sad, sensual and strange. Compositions by David Lang and John Tavener are upstaged by Arvo Pärt’s marvellous adaptation of Burns’s romantic ballad “My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here …”, when Else Torp’s clear voice falls like a sudden burst of rain over sere ground. This surely is the great beauty, the last ritual element of the great tradition still embodied in the Church that so fascinates Jep Gambardella. But it casts a neo-baroque mood over La Grande Bellezza, making it seem more operetta than film.

Sorrentino has saddled his film with literary ambition. The attentive viewer will notice that it opens with nothing less than the epigraph from Céline’s famous first novel Voyage au bout de la nuit. Sorrentino obviously wishes us to draw parallels between his film and that merciless novel about trying to come to terms with the world under the terrible circumstances of the First World War (and that in spite of Céline’s dismissive likening of going to the cinema in the 1920s to paying for an hour with a prostitute—“le nouveau petit salarié de nos rêves”), and he tries very hard to turn Jep into a kind of hardened cynic like Bardamu in Céline’s novel. The congruence seems strained, not least because Jep’s circumstances are so much more fortunate than those of any of Céline’s characters. Nor is there any real conflict in his life for the comparison to hold: Jep should be considered fortunate that all he has to cope with is ordinary weltschmerz.

At the end of the film, he sums up his experience in Céline’s terms: “I was looking for the great beauty and I didn’t find it … This is how it always ends, with death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah.”

Even Maria, the saintly and cadaverous Mother Teresa-lookalike, reputedly 104, who gets trundled on in the closing scenes as a kind of living relic, seems to be an allusion to the Abbé with the bad teeth in Céline’s Voyage. Her role in the film, and that of the mildly sinister Cardinal Bellucci, one of the top exorcists in Europe and a character who clearly fascinates Gambardella (especially since his passion is not for the things of the spirit but for food and its rites of preparation), is actually an ironic comment on how cinema recoups what is lost to the novel, and indeed on how cinema stands in relation to the millennial history of the Church’s experience of staging things. It takes the withered and ugly Maria—who has devoted her life to the poor in Mali—to cause a group of pink flamingos to scatter into the evening sky above the Eternal City. “It’s just a trick,” Jep adds, after his complaint about “the blah, blah, blah”. It may have been another sighting of the great beauty, and even Jep must have noticed the implications of the flamingos taking flight.

Sorrentino can’t stop himself at times from turning his portrait of Jep into a condition-of-Italy movie, with Jep as its somnambulistic janitor. This is blatantly obvious in the dislocated scene in which he suddenly turns up on the Tuscan island of Giglio to gaze out at the wreck of the cruise ship Costa Concordia.

What Jep really needs to do is stay at home for a couple of nights and find himself in Pascal’s Pensées. “If our condition were truly happy we shouldn’t need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.” The disco scenes, with the bodies writhing to techno in a backdrop from Bosch, actually make Rome resemble its archaeological anti-city, Berlin, where people party under the sign of erasure.

All these parties—Eurotrash as the contemporary expression goes—offer in the way of ritual is their closing moment when the guests, tiring of the latest swing house version of “We No Speak Americano”, line up in a long farandole and do what is elsewhere called the conga. Jep knows it as the little train, or il trenino, “They have the most beautiful trenini here in Rome. They are beautiful because they go nowhere.”