La Grande Bellezza

La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) by Paolo Sorrentino has won the Academy Award for Best Foreign language Film. 

What is the topic? It's not only a man story, but the whole mankind story: there's parties' entertainment, a whole fun-lovings' generation, without thoughts and worries, but there's also the void around us, inside us. However there's some dissatisfaction, even if we think to get all we want: not all we get is beautiful, there's something missing, indeed a void. Jep is mankind looking for a beauty that really meets his needs, so he usually walks down the streets around Rome (there are beautiful framings of Rome landscapes) seeking after an unknown beauty. Only once he has the possibility to come up to beauty, it happened when he was a teenager chasing after a beautiful girl and discovering love.

The film refers to the Decadent movement, because shows us the rejection of what is fake and considered "progress" (as all material things). It shows Jep's walk of life step by step, according to Kierkegaard Existentialism: a man grows up by going through aesthetic life (enterteinment), ethical life and religious life (when Jep met La Santa). 

It seems a little theatre where every man's playing his role, according to Fellini style.

The last scene tells us the sense of great beauty:

"So, it always ends with death, but first there was hidden life under blah blah. It's all hidden under chatter and noise, silence and feeling, fear and unsettled flashes of beauty and then there's the wretched squalor and man. All is buried by embarassment of being in the world, blah blah blah. Somewhere else there is somewhere else, I do not take care of somewhere else, therefore, this novel begins! It's only a trick, yes, it's only a trick".

"Finisce sempre così, con la morte, prima però c'è stata la vita nascosta sotto il bla bla bla... è tutto sedimentato sotto il chiacchiericcio e il rumore, il silenzio e il sentimento e la paura.... gli sparuti inconstanti sprazzi di bellezza e poi lo squallore disgrazoiato e l'uomo miserabile. Tutto sepolto dalla coperta dell'imbarazzo dello stare al mondo. Altrove c'è l'altrove, io non mi occupo dell'altrove. Dunque che questo romanzo abbia inizio, d'altronde è solo un trucco, sì, è solo un trucco".