foto credit: Stefano Chiacchiarini '74 / Shutterstock.com
To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: “P***y”. Whereas I answered “The smell of old people’s houses”. The question was “What do you really like the most in life?” I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer.
(Jep Gambardella)
Jep Gambardella arrived in the Eternal City at the age of 26, and from that moment on, he dedicated himself entirely to it. He didn’t want to be just another passerby in its hectic life. He wanted to know it, conquer it, and eventually master it. But, as in any love story dominated by fascination, the roles were ultimately reversed, and Rome, with its constant vibrancy, ended up mastering Jep Gambardella.
Now, on his sixty-fifth birthday, the journalist Jep experiences a sort of continuous but unsatisfactory carpe diem in the select and exclusive circles and places of Rome, trying to escape the feeling of absurdity that has haunted his existence ever since he wrote his first (and only) novel, the shadow of which still looms over him today.
Much like the Fellini-esque journalist Marcello once wandered down Via Veneto in search of La Dolce Vita, Jep Gambardella embarks on his own quest, one that consumes him day by day and condemns him to a state of perpetual restlessness. Destined for sensitivity, as he’s come to realize, Jep endlessly searches for *La Grande Bellezza*. However, disappointment (disguised as cynicism) follows him everywhere. His inner turmoil continues even when — or perhaps especially when — memories from his past, as troubled as the present, resurface, preventing him from writing a new novel, a dream he occasionally entertains.
It’s not characters Jep lacks — he encounters them at every turn, and each one either disgusts, amuses, or teaches him something. Nor is he short of stories: in a city whose beauty intoxicates him daily, stories surround him, revealing themselves even without him seeking them out. But time passes for both Jep and Rome; sometimes everything seems lost, and nostalgia takes over the increasingly trivial landscape, in the face of which life's pleasures become the most accessible defense mechanism.
Much like in a novel of waiting, the disarming turning point in Jep Gambardella's story comes from the most unexpected place: a change in perspective. A brief but significant encounter with an old circus friend, the performer of the disappearing giraffe act, gives Jep the key to his entire story. Only then does he allow himself to begin writing the second novel of his life — the first *true* novel — without searching any longer for the ineffable, which had, until then, prevented him from writing. After all, as his illusionist friend explains, “it’s all just a trick.”
La Grande Bellezza is, in fact, a lesson Jep Gambardella receives in his troubling search, but also a lesson in cinema that director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino offers, starting from the concept of cinema as illusion rather than truth. For truth, when portrayed, doesn’t nourish the spectacle nearly as well as cleverly invented lies do.
It’s a declared tribute to Fellini’s cinema and to the great Italian cinematic tradition in general. An art film about sensitivity, the destiny of a writer, and the Great Beauty of Life. Not coincidentally, it was the recipient of the Golden Globe and the winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
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