Original title: “La grande bellezza”
Italy – Comedy/Drama – Year: 2013 – Running time: 142 mins
Audience feedback: Rating: 
(4.0 from 15 responses)
‘Excellent’: 6 votes- ‘Very Good’: 5 votes
- ‘Good’: 2 votes
- ‘Satisfactory’: 2 votes
- ‘Poor’: 0 votes
Life is a performance and Rome is the stage in Sorrentino’s (Il Divo, The Consequences of Love) latest work. Toni Servillo features again, playing the dapper, cultured and dilettantish writer Jep Gambardella, who, for decades, has seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome. As the film opens, he celebrates his 65th birthday with a hedonistic party in his flash apartment overlooking the Coliseum on one side and a convent on the other. In his world, the high life meets the low life but Jep is seeking a new landscape of absurd and exquisite beauty.
… an utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty that evokes Fellini’s La Dolce Vita by way of Baz Luhrmann.
Geoff Pevere, The Globe and Mail
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
This Must Be The Place (2011) / The Consequences of Love (2004)
CFC Film notes (Nigel Best)
Audience feedback
Discussion forum for “A Great Beauty”
Further reading:
Telegraph Film (Robbie Collin)
The Observer (Mark Kermode)
Theatrical trailer: