La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty)
Spring 2014 Features series
Sunday, May 18, 2014 at 8:00pm
Acadia Cinema's Al Whittle Theatre
450 Main Street, Wolfville, NS
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Screenplay by Umberto Contarello and Paolo Sorrentino
Starring Sabrina Ferilli, Carlo Verdone, and Toni Servillo
Rated NR ·
2h 22m
France / Italy
Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian
La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty)
Journalist Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo, Il divo, Gomorrah) has charmed and seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades. Since the legendary success of his one and only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city’s literary and social circles, but when his sixty-fifth birthday coincides with a shock from the past, Jep finds himself unexpectedly taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries, and looking past the extravagant nightclubs, parties, and cafés to find Rome in all its glory: a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.
Provocative Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino (Il divo) reunites with Toni Servillo for this portrait of a world-weary journalist searching for his long-lost idealism while drifting through the dolce vita of Rome’s high spots and fleshpots. The film’s subject matter extends well beyond the crisis the sixty-five-year-old protagonist is undergoing, for The Great Beauty is determined to look into the very soul of Italy . . .
The Great Beauty is a grand indictment of a man, and a society, that has lost its way. Toni Servillo dazzles in the lead role, serving Sorrentino’s grandly ambitious vision perfectly.
Winner of the Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and many other awards.
“The Great Beauty blasts off from its very first plunge into the social stew of contemporary Rome, conscientiously reinventing Fellini’s La Dolce Vita for the 21st century and nailing the city’s chattering leisure class to the wall for all time. There’s little sense in trying to resist the film’s relentless boogie-woogie party vibe, its tumultuous visual banquet, its unpredictable sense of switchblade satire, its fools’ parade of modern grotesques, or its river of startling melancholy, turning from a wary trickle to a flash flood by film’s end. Sorrentino’s vision is the size of Rome itself, and his confidence is dazzling. So rambunctious and densely inhabited it’s a movie you visit, not merely watch, The Great Beauty is also one of the greatest films about modern social dissolution, an epic art-film subgenre that never gets old.” (Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice)
“A radiant work on the meaning of life … The Great Beauty is drop-dead gorgeous, a film that is luxuriously, seductively, stunningly cinematic. But more than intoxicating imagery is on director Paolo Sorrentino’s mind, a lot more.” (Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times)
“The Great Beauty, an essay on nostalgia, gives even the cynics a faith in the vibrancy of movies and the reviving artistry of Paolo Sorrentino … it is the year’s grandest, most exhilarating foreign film.” (Richard and Mary Corliss, Time Magazine)