Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.
I wasn’t more than 20 minutes in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), winner of the most recent Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, when I felt as if I had very much seen this film before. I have. The last time I saw this, it was called La Dolce Vita and was directed by Federico Fellini. The parallels between this film and that one are unmistakable and absolutely intentional. This is not the first time director Paolo Sorrentino has been compared with Fellini. My research after the fact indicates that I am not alone in this impression.
This is the story of Jep Gambardella (Tony Servillo), who was an acclaimed author in his youth. He wrote a single book for which he received a great deal of fame and at least one significant award. Rather than following that success up with a second book, though, he took to a life of high life partying in Rome. For income, he writes about art, artists, and famous people for a newspaper. But mostly, he goes to wild parties. As the film opens, we see his 65th birthday party, which involves a number of the beautiful people of Italy, dancing, music, drinking, and presumably a great deal of sex.
