Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza was released a decade ago. The trailer amounted to a cinematographic seduction targeting the Italophile with cruel precision: Interspersed with flashy scenes of raucous nightlife were sweeping shots of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and Colosseum bathed in honeyed light and majestic umbrella stone pines against the night sky. I watched the Oscar-winning film when it was first released and enjoyed it. But I must have been hypnotized by its sheer visual dazzle, because on a recent re-watching I realized that I recollected almost nothing of the spiritual crisis at the film’s core.

Protagonist Jep Gambardella is an aging bon viveur, critic, and author who never managed a sequel to his successful first novel, The Human Apparatus. To all outward appearances a devil-may-care playboy, Jep calls himself a romantic. We learn that he has never gotten over Elisa, the love of his youth, and throughout the film’s first half hour we see cracks accrue in his wryly insouciant facade.

Then the man Elisa went on to marry materializes to deliver doubly shocking news: Elisa has just died, and her diary revealed she loved only Jep until the end.

Jep epitomizes coolness, and only in certain frames does his composure falter. But the audience perceives how the ground threatens to collapse beneath him as he spirals into what-ifs, imagining the life of familial warmth and love he could have had.

I did remember one key element of La Grande Bellezza from that first viewing: A desiccated missionary nun—nicknamed “the Saint”; clearly modeled on Mother Teresa but looking far older—catalyzes a transformation in Jep toward the film’s end. Incredibly, she read and enjoyed Jep’s long-ago novel, and when she visits Rome, she seeks him out. We have recently seen him instruct a friend on how to affect wisdom when comforting the bereaved, but he hungers desperately for the real thing. The tiny missionary, who lives on a spartan diet of roots, is able to provide it.

“Roots are important,” she tells Jep. It’s one of very few lines she speaks, and its meaning for Jep is layered. He is preoccupied with the roots of his own story, but the Saint is pointing to something far deeper. “Did you know that I know the Christian names of all of these birds?” she says of the flamingos who have miraculously stopped to rest on the balcony where she sits in predawn darkness. A moment later, Sorrentino apparently corroborates her claim: The flamingos respond to her feeble breath like a command.

As they take flight, we feel something lift in us. Here is a soul fully connected with the Great Beauty, indeed: to the root not of any one person, but of all things—the truest Reality of all. The human is no apparatus, after all, but a living soul longing for that universal connection. Scenes of the sun rising across Rome unfold, and we understand the exorcism Jep sought has been, at least momentarily, achieved. The menace of the nighttime bacchanal gives way to the relief of light and air.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, in Sorrentino’s realization we have a thousand stunning pictures. But the true accomplishment is how he manages to imbue these images with meaning, giving us to understand that sometimes beauty is a mask, and sometimes it is anything but.
 
When the Saint appears, we are 112 minutes into a film glutted, until that point, with glamorous bodies. They range from young and stereotypically attractive to aging and grotesquely painted, but all these bodies’ inhabitants are united in their devotion to physical appearance. The Saint, downright cadaverous, presents a contrast so stark it is shocking. We wonder what we are to make of her, and as her assistant describes the extent of her austerity, we suspect the answer might be: punchline. She is so wholly incongruous with everything else in the film as to seem absurd. But when Jep finally speaks to her one on one, something else emerges. She sees right to his heart and asks why he never wrote another book. “I was looking for the great beauty,” he responds, “but I never found it.” Jep has been seeking Radiance in flashy illusions; here he finds it in the last place he would have thought to look.