{"id":7957,"date":"2023-04-26T14:37:34","date_gmt":"2023-04-26T14:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=7957"},"modified":"2023-09-06T15:14:25","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T15:14:25","slug":"la-grande-bellezza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/26\/la-grande-bellezza\/","title":{"rendered":"La Grande Bellezza"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Beauty Against Despair<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Sorrentino\u2019s film, now a decade old, offers a powerful picture of real beauty, both visually and through its narrative of spiritual renewal.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Marie Glancy O’Shea
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Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza <\/em>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\u2019 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\u2019s core.

Protagonist Jep Gambardella is an aging bon viveur<\/em>, critic, and author who never managed a sequel to his successful first novel, The Human Apparatus<\/em>. 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\u2019s first half hour we see cracks accrue in his wryly insouciant facade.<\/p>

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.<\/p>

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 <\/em>from that first viewing: A desiccated missionary nun\u2014nicknamed \u201cthe Saint\u201d; clearly modeled on Mother Teresa but looking far older\u2014catalyzes a transformation in Jep toward the film\u2019s end. Incredibly, she read and enjoyed Jep\u2019s 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.

\u201cRoots are important,\u201d she tells Jep. It\u2019s 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. \u201cDid you know that I know the Christian names of all of these birds?\u201d 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\u2014the 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\u2019s 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.
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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\u2019 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. \u201cI was looking for the great beauty,\u201d he responds, \u201cbut I never found it.\u201d Jep has been seeking Radiance in flashy illusions; here he finds it in the last place he would have thought to look.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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I don\u2019t know what degree of poverty is necessary for spiritual growth, and I don\u2019t know what accommodations, if any, Jep will make for his glimpse of saintly beauty.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Why does Jep\u2019s arc strike a chord in 2023? I put it down to the zeitgeist. In the ten years since the film was made, we\u2019ve seen a crescendo of doomsday data on the environment, metastatic disease in our body politic, a deadly pandemic, and a resurrected nuclear specter. Internet-connected devices now ensure that bad news bulletins and the vitriol common to social media pursue us everywhere we go. Maybe worse, devices rip us from the present, where beauty and God are found.

In the same week I re-watched Sorrentino\u2019s film, The Guardian<\/em> ran a somewhat tongue-in-cheek article<\/a> about the meme-ification of Ben Affleck\u2019s disaffected expression at the Grammys. Affleck\u2019s face, the writer contended, expresses what writers and readers of The Guardian<\/em> are all feeling\u2014namely, a bone-crushing ennui. Yes, the excesses of the rich and famous are off-putting; that\u2019s an eternal truism. But the assumption that a majority of well-educated, relatively well-off Guardian<\/em> readers will agree the world is fundamentally a sigh-inducing place, drained of color? That seems new, and it concerns me.

Jep, like Affleck as interpreted by The Guardian<\/em>, is surrounded by opulence, and yet feels empty. He meets a Saint who sleeps on cardboard and radiates joy. He comes away renewed. It\u2019s an arc that might hold clues for our own healing.

Reading that piece in The Guardian<\/em>, I thought of several missioner priests I have interviewed lately for a project to record their reflections on years spent serving the poor overseas. One spent several years in a notorious slum, securing medical treatment for the sick and burials for the dead. To me, the mere thought of such an environment seems almost enough to bring on a crisis of faith: Why do some people suffer so much? What difference can one person make? I asked him how he integrated his witness of suffering with his faith, and he cited Matthew 25: \u201cFor I was hungry, and you gave me to eat\u2026\u201d

I\u2019ve heard this Gospel so many times that I don\u2019t really hear it anymore. But the missioner\u2019s answer woke me up. From my comfortable perch, I ask \u201cWhy?\u201d and \u201cWhat difference?\u201d But on the streets of the shantytown, the choice is simple: help, or don\u2019t. It\u2019s no longer, in other words, really a choice at all. The choice came earlier, when the missioner left an environment of material abundance in favor of a place where need is right at the surface, everywhere you look.

The Saint tells Jep and his companions, \u201cYou do not talk about poverty; you live it.\u201d Jesus similarly pulls no punches when he tells the rich man to give away his possessions. Elsewhere he says that the poor of heart<\/em> are blessed. I don\u2019t know what degree of poverty is necessary for spiritual growth, and I don\u2019t know what accommodations, if any, Jep will make for his glimpse of saintly beauty. But in the film\u2019s final scenes, we see him travel by boat to the coastal promontory he most associates with his youthful love, smiling he recalls her face and realizes he is ready\u2014eager\u2014to start his next novel.

It is, as I see it, a 65-year-old\u2019s valediction to his youth. A lovely face or a fiery sunset can be appreciated at any age, and should be. But the kinds of facile beauty that Jep once worshiped might be best understood as avatars; they point to something of another order. That is the Beauty that we seek in bold defiance of despair, a Beauty so fearfully powerful, it can emanate from the image of flesh and blood on the cross.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Marie Glancy O’Shea<\/strong> is a writer and editor who has covered culture, finance, and travel for publications including <\/em>America, <\/em>The Columbia Journalism Review, and <\/em>CNN.com. She has written, co-written, and adapted several plays for Manhattan\u2019s New Stage Theatre Company, and is the recipient of an Individual Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and children.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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La Grande Bellezza<\/strong> was released on May 21, 2013. It was directed by Paolo Sorrentino and won the Best Foreign Language Film award at the 86th Academy Awards. You can find it streaming online through a variety of services. <\/em>
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Sorrentino\u2019s film, now a decade old, offers a powerful picture of real beauty, both visually and through its narrative of spiritual renewal. Review by Marie 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