The Great Beauty

AroView: This Academy-Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film has director Paolo Sorrentino’s regular lead Toni Servillo as an aging Roman journalist whose life of decadence comes under reflection upon his 65th birthday.

It’s a visual treatise on modern Rome that pays explicit homage to Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA and the aesthetic beauty of Italy’s landscape, ruins and sartorial elegance, though the director’s self-conscious style arguably detracts as much as it enhances the intended experience. In exploring the futility of modern life as a theme, its search for meaning is limited by a narrow world-view that the film-maker and his protagonist seem to share.

“Sumptuous and self-indulgent, Sorrentino’s latest is a Fellini-like feast for the eyes.” ~Empire.