The Great Beauty · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A Japanese tourist steps away from his tour group on the Janiculum, lifts his camera toward the city below, and dies of the view. The noon cannon has just fired. A chorus is singing. The camera doesn't stop for him. It drifts off to find other faces, and before we have met a single character the film has told us its rules. Rome is not going to be the place where the story happens. Rome is the thing that happens to you.

Paolo Sorrentino's invention is in that drift. Luca Bigazzi's camera cranes up over rooftop parties and tracks laterally through frescoed galleries, attached to nobody in the scene. Deleuze, following Vertov, had a name for vision like that: an eye with no human center in it, the camera as one more piece of matter that happens to see. Then Bigazzi cuts to Toni Servillo's face in shallow focus, watching, and the shot becomes a different thing — a camera perceiving a man who is perceiving, so that we feel the seeing apparatus itself standing there. Deleuze called that a dicisign. The film alternates the two for two hours, and the alternation is its motor, because no plot is running underneath.

Deleuze, writing about what happened to cinema after 1945, described the older kind of movie as a circuit. A character perceives a situation, acts on it, the situation changes. Break that circuit and what you get is someone he called a voyant, a seer: a person who can only look at what he has understood. Jep Gambardella is a seer with forty years of practice. He is the most competent man at every party in Rome and his competence accomplishes nothing. He interviews the self-mythologizing performance artist. He takes the measure of a Botox clinic run like a sacrament. He watches a child hurled at a canvas by her parents to produce an action painting. None of it is available to him as something to do. Deleuze's term for the image that fills the gap is the opsign, the pure optical situation, offered to be seen rather than acted on.

The reason to bother with this vocabulary is that it turns the film's apparent shapelessness into a technique. Jep says Rome has the best conga lines in the world precisely because they go nowhere. Deleuze had already named that shape: the balade, the stroll or trip that transforms nothing, which he found in the postwar Italians and then in the New Wave. In older cinema a journey delivered somebody somewhere. Here the going-nowhere is the form, which means Cristiano Travaglioli's editing has to supply the forward pressure that story withholds — a match on movement, a hard pivot from farce to grief, a party cut hard against silence. The trenino sequence is the whole method in one set piece, ecstatic and then hollow.

Around Jep the film assembles what Deleuze called a dispersive situation: many characters, weakly linked, none of them converging into a plot. Romano the failed playwright who finally leaves. Ramona, the aging cabaret stripper. The clergy staged as grotesque tableaux, and the 104-year-old missionary they call the Saint. Everyone in this world knows exactly what they are, and Jep knows first. Deleuze thought the hardest problem in modern cinema was the cliché: once people become conscious of moving among clichés, irony gets easy and everything else gets nearly impossible. Jep's wit is armor built entirely out of knowing. The film's real question — can anything reach a man who has already seen through everything? — is Deleuze's question about images, transposed into a person.

Then the crystal. Deleuze's crystal-image is a shot in which the present and its reflection, or its memory, can no longer be pulled apart. His great case was Visconti, and Visconti's particular version has a name: the crystal in decomposition. An aristocratic world, exquisitely ordered and complete, rots from the inside, and the beauty and the rot turn out to be the same substance. That is the direct line from The Leopard, whose crane-mobile ballroom and patrician contemplating his own obsolescence Jep inherits down to the tailoring. Sorrentino shot in real palaces, real gardens, real monuments, so the decay is documentary even when the staging is caricature. Jep's terrace looks out at the Colosseum: a private life arranged against the ruin of an empire, both of them still gorgeous.

What gets through the crystal is the sea. A girl on the rocks, a lighthouse, a shipwreck, returning across the film without dates or explanations. It matters that these are not flashbacks. A flashback is a labeled excursion that hands you back to the present, and Deleuze had a flat term for it, the recollection-image. What Sorrentino uses instead is a sheet of past: not a moment but a whole region of former life, coexisting with the present, which a person can enter at different depths. The news of Elisa's death doesn't give Jep a memory to retrieve. It gives him access to a level of himself he stopped visiting forty years ago. The wonder recovered at the end isn't remembering. It's arriving.

Servillo carries all of this in posture. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, used the word gest for an attitude of the body that exposes a social relation. The cut of the jacket, the small deflating smile, the way Jep holds himself at the edge of a crowd: this is a social position held so long it has set into a physique. Sorrentino stages the parties as tableaux of grotesque vitality, then isolates one still body inside them.

A note on where this sits in theory. Bazin defended the postwar Italians for letting reality keep its ambiguity — real places, long takes, depth of field, no editorial coercion. Sorrentino keeps the real places and spends them on artifice. Digital capture and grading warm Roman stone toward gold and deepen the night sky until the city becomes a designed palette rather than a documentary one, while the soundtrack sets club bass against Martynov's Beatitudes and David Lang, profane against sacred, so the film's argument is audible before anyone speaks it. A Bazinian inheritance turned to un-Bazinian ends. Worth noticing rather than settling.

The debts are specific and Sorrentino hides none of them. La Dolce Vita supplies the template: the nocturnal Roman promenade guided by a disenchanted insider-journalist, and the sacred-profane collision of the airlifted Christ that Jep's rooftop world answers. 8½ supplies creative paralysis staged as spectacle; the unwritten second novel is Guido's abandoned film. Roma supplies the city as autobiographical fresco punctuated by surreal set pieces, its ecclesiastical fashion parade the ancestor of Sorrentino's clerical grotesques and his Saint. La Notte supplies the all-night party as spiritual accounting, with architecture and empty space doing the emotional work. The Conformist supplies the grammar itself: Storaro's baroque tracking keyed to interior décor, which is where Bigazzi's glides come from. Film here is a discourse, and Sorrentino is speaking it out loud.

So what did it do? The time-image was invented in ruins, by filmmakers with no money, photographing people to whom nothing could be done. The Great Beauty demonstrates that the mode never needed the rubble. Abundance dissolves the action-image as thoroughly as poverty does: give a man every pleasure and four decades of access, and he ends up as unable to act as any of Rossellini's survivors. The film's awards run pushed that mode back into wide international circulation at a moment when subtitled art cinema rarely traveled. Whether Sorrentino earns his final turn toward the sacred is genuinely arguable, and the film is better for leaving it arguable.

Watch it again for one thing. Notice when the camera stops. It floats through everything, and then a few times it settles and holds on a face, and those are the film's actual events. The tourist on the Janiculum died of a view. The open question is whether Jep finally sees the same thing, or only learns how to survive it.