A portrait of an aspiring filmmaker

 

   Among today's filmmakers, Paolo Sorrentino qualifies as an undisputed visual master. Sorrentino became best known in the U.S. when The Great Beauty splashed onto the festival circuit in 2013. 

  Sorrentino later directed two HBO offerings -- The Young Pope (2016) and The New Pope (2019) -- strangely alluring tales that mixed irreverence, calumny, eroticism, and something approaching genuine faith.

  Now comes Sorrentino's The Hand of God, a comic (for the most part) coming-of-age story about Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), a young soccer fan who longs for the day when the great Diego Maradona will play for the Naples’ hometown team, S.S.C. Napoli.

  Bucking the odds, meager Napoli snags Maradona but the story has less to do with soccer fanaticism than with Sorrentino's sharply drawn collection of characters.

  Fabietto has a crush on his sexually irresistible aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri). Patrizia understands and accepts the boy's fascination with her. She clearly lives on a more sensual plane than the rest of her family.

   Additional characters include Fabietto's genial father (Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo) and his mother (a terrific Teresa Saponagelo). Fabietto's brother Marino (Marlon Joubert) wants to be an actor. We suspect that he probably won't realize his dream. 

    The Hand of God has a robust, slightly ribald quality that can be taken as an homage to Federico Fellini's Amarcord. The story takes place at a time when Fellini was still king of Italian cinema and the great director is mentioned at various points. 

   There's a joyous sense of discovery about the movie's early scenes when even the weirdest characters prove endearingly comfortable in their own skins.

   The movie's opening boldly displays the strangeness that Sorrentino has made into something of a trademark. Patrizia encounters a character called The Little Monk, a cleric who bestows the gift of fertility on her 

   Baronessa Focale (Betty Pedrazzi) presents a sustained level of cynicism and disapproval but plays a surprising role in Fabietto's development. 

   No fair telling what happens, but Hand of God makes an extreme tonal shift after a key event subverts earlier comic qualities. That's probably what Sorrentino intended but, at least for me, it sometimes felt as if I were watching another film.

  Hand of God loses something when it turns into yet another artistic origins story, an arc that's too familiar and alas, a little indulgent: another kid aspiring to become a filmmaker. 

   Oh well, at least Fabietto wasn't aiming to become a writer, the career usually found in films about artistically ambitious adolescents.

   Reservations aside, I wouldn't totally dismiss The Hand of God. At its best, the movie is drenched in affection, the kind one feels for the eccentrics of characters who populated one's formati7ve years.  

 

Prime minister as party animal and top dog

Those familiar with the work of director Paolo Sorrentino (Great Beauty, Youth and HBO's The Young Pope) know that the director creates images of startling beauty and resonant suggestion. Sorrentino brings his full visual powers to Loro, a look at the life of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, played here by Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo. Sorrentino begins the movie by focusing on a character named Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio), a low-level hustler who aspires to become a recognized Berlusconi sycophant. To achieve his goal, Sergio rents a villa in Sardinia, the island where Berlusconi has gone to regroup. Sergio stocks his villa with beautiful young women and prays that his sybaritic neighbor will take notice. Scenes at the villa, heavy on nudity and sensual choreography, are perhaps intended to show the pornography of power with an ample helping of La Dolce Vita-style emptiness. Just as Berlusconi eventually will do, Sorrentino pushes Sergio aside to bring the film's full focus onto Berlusconi, a man of amorality, charm, and flashes of ruthlessness. Elene Sofia Ricci portrays Berlusconi's wife, a woman accustomed to overlooking her husband's massive philandering -- but who may have reached the end of a very tolerant rope. Loro -- Italian for "them" -- immerses in the personality and aura of a man who seems to regard the world as his personal pleasure palace. References to the suffering of ordinary folks crop up at the movie's end but aren't enough to diminish the feeling of a film enamored with a rogue who built a TV empire and who specialized in humiliating his foes. Besides, we get the point long before the movie's two hours and 30-minutes wind to a halt. Still, Servillo delivers another masterful performance and Sorrentino paves the movie with the kind of images that seduce, reveal and create their own sense of mystery. How much of the story is true? Sorrentino hedges a bit with an opening title card, but his movie may have more to do with the atmospherics of rampant corruption than with a play-by-play look at Berlusconi's career.

'The Great Beauty' is aptly named

An Italian film that dazzles the eye -- and doesn't neglect the mind, either.

Like a beautiful river in spring, director Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty overflows with sights that re-awaken our sense of what cinema can accomplish, the way it can startle the eye and activate the senses.

Some critics have viewed The Great Beauty as a descendant of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), a look at debauched Roman life that takes place 53 years after Fellini assayed the same subject. Comparisons with Fellini are further fostered by the fact that the main character in both movies is a disaffected journalist.

Sorrentino must have been aware of his film's kinship with La Dolce Vita, but it would be irresponsibly wrongheaded to view The Great Beauty as wannabe Fellini. The movie speaks in its own voice and has its own concerns.

The Great Beauty centers on Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a writer who started his career as a novelist and shifted to journalism, a craft he seems to practice only sporadically.

Jep might be the living embodiment of squandered potential: He wrote one high acclaimed novel, and never wrote another. Instead of developing his art, Jep devoted his life to Rome's near-decadent social scene: He's an unashamed party animal, a man for whom parties can equate with power.

Early on, Jep says that he aspired to be king of the socialites, a man with the power to make parties fail should he choose to do so.

Fittingly, the movie's first party is a doozy. To celebrate his 65th birthday, Jep organizes a teeming gala replete with throbbing, infectious music that seizes the revelers, including his editor (Giovanna Vignola), a dwarf who's as savvy as Jep and who can be as unsparing in her assessments of others.

Jeb may not appear anguished, but he knows he's reached an existential dead end. At one point, he says that his crowd knows how to do the best train dance in Rome. Why the best? Because it goes nowhere.

As the movie unfolds, Jep learns that the woman he first loved has died. He then begins an often wry examination of what many might regard as a wasted life. He also meets two women. Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli) is a stripper who continues to work even though she's in her 40s; Giusi Merli plays a woman many regard as a saint, an impoverished, toothless nun who sleeps on floors and who has a startling otherworldly presence.

Servillo makes a charming host; at moments when the movie feels a bit confusing, he's there to remind us that we're watching a meditation about Rome, about the city's strange juxtaposition of ancient ruins (Jep's apartment overlooks the Colosseum) and chic modern design, about the city's sensory appeal and about the sybaritic pleasures to which Jep has devoted much of his life.

No matter what else you get out of The Great Beauty, it will reward your senses with carefully chosen music (from techno pop to Henryk Gorecki), with the ravishing imagery cooked up by Sorrentino and his cinematographer Luca Bigazzi and with Serville's engagingly worldly performance.

In a way, Jep's a connoisseur of the senses. Servillo doesn't so much walk as he glides. He makes it clear that Jep wears his sophistication easily. There doesn't seem to be an ounce of strain in him.

Sometimes, I forgot about trying to make anything much out The Great Beauty, but feasted on imagery that continues even through the movie's end credits. In an age of 3-D and comic-book blockbusters, I'd almost forgotten what magnificent visual imagery can do for a movie.

The only special effects in evidence here are Sorrentino's and Bigazzi's incomparable eyes, their unsurpassed sense of composition and color. The Great Beauty is a cinematic temptation: The movie plays like a brilliant, witty conversation that's loaded with intriguing asides.

I was once on a train in Italy; the man sitting next to me asked where I was headed.
"Rome," I said.

"Ah, Roma,'' he responded, putting much color and commentary into the word. There was admiration, cynicism, respect, perhaps even a touch of world-weariness in his tone.

After watching The Great Beauty, I thought about that voice again.
"Ah, Roma," indeed.