Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Great Beauty
2013 · Paolo Sorrentino · The Great Beauty on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the camera moving with nobody. It drifts on its own. (camera)
Luca Bigazzi cranes above rooftop parties and tracks sideways through frescoed galleries, attached to no character in the scene. The prologue on the Janiculum belongs to the city and to a tour group, not to anyone we will follow.
Payoff: Rome is not the place where the story happens. Rome is the thing happening to the people in it. In the reading: engramme / camera-eye. The reading calls this a camera-eye: vision with no human center, the lens as one more thing in the city that happens to see.
Wait for the camera to stop and settle on Servillo's face. (camera)
After all the floating, Bigazzi cuts to shallow-focus close-ups of Jep watching. The film pulses between enormous movement and a still man's eyes, over and over, for two hours.
Payoff: Those held faces are the actual events. Everything else is the parade they are watching.
Listen for club bass giving way to a choir. (sound)
Sorrentino sets pounding dance tracks against sacred minimalist concert music, including Martynov's Beatitudes and David Lang. The two never blend. One stops and the other starts.
Payoff: The film makes its argument audible before anyone speaks it. Beauty and noise are being placed side by side for comparison.
Watch Toni Servillo's small deflating smile after each witty line. (performance)
Jep is the most capable person at every party and his capability achieves nothing. Servillo plays the tailoring, the posture and the eyes as defensive architecture built over forty years of knowing better.
Payoff: A social position held that long has set into a body. The wit is armor, and you can see where it is bolted on.
Notice a raucous party cut straight against silence. (cutting)
Cristiano Travaglioli joins scenes by rhythm and association rather than cause. A vignette arrives with no setup: a child hurled at a canvas, a clinic run like a sacrament, a performance artist explaining herself.
Payoff: With no plot pushing, the editing supplies the momentum. The film moves by juxtaposition rather than by consequence.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Notice when the camera stops moving. It floats through everything, and the few faces it settles on are the film's real events.