La Grande Ballezza (2013)

You have nothing better to do this weekend than watch this movie

Originally published on my Substack December 17, 2020

Blah blah blah Fellini’s baroque, surrealist decadence blah blah. Blah blah blah deft technique transmutes the viewer into the living canvas of one of de Chirico’s nightscapes blah blah blah (if you want to read some critic talking absolute balls about this film go elsewhere).

When a movie opens with a quotation from Céline’s hilariously sordid Voyage au Bout de la Nuit there’s a pretty good chance that the picture was made by the cognoscenti for the cognoscenti. And that’s partially true of The Great Beauty.

I’m old enough to remember when “We No Speak Americano” dropped and I was for it. These were halcyon days in Montreal. I miss elbowing my way through pulsating mobs of undergraduates in grey skinny jeans at some louche nightclub on Sainte-Laurent (if the alternative was tipptoeing around masked yuppies in Cambridge you would to) and stumbling into a splendid haze of Belmont smoke and frigid air where the only the only topic of interest was who would host the after party. La Grande Ballezza is set among Rome’s nocturnal intelligentsia so while my memories are less exquisite, the soundtrack remains the same.

Our hero is none other than Jep Gambardella the raconteur par excellence and girdled roué who splits his time between chain-smoking cigarettes with studied insouciance and complaining about his exhausting social life. He wrote one novel four decades ago and has been killing the time until his writer’s block expires (or he does).

(Above: Our shamelessly debonaire, self-involved protagonist)

Jep has finally succumbed to his own complacency when we meet him. He’s spent the last 40 years affecting contempt for the vapid culture he sits astride but no longer believes he’s a thing apart. He’s prepared to fritter away the twilight of his life as he did his youth, adrift in his beloved, if eternally damned Roma (queue an Italian cover of “Under the Bridge”).

His Proustian madeleine (convenient plot device) comes in the form of an unexpected visitor which forces him to reflect on his life, loves, and mortality. As you might expect there is some sex, drugs, and plenty of techno throughout the subsequent 120 minutes. It’s a party you won’t want to miss.

This film is brilliantly acted, stunningly photographed, and achieves enough pretentiousness to make you feel like a high-brow while watching it without ever being boring. Toni Servillo’s performance is a tour de force, delivering ripostes like “I'm not a misogynist, I'm a misanthropist”, with enough withering irony to charm and repulse. The subtlety with which he conveys Jep’s crapulous self-loathing is masterful.

You will laugh, smile, and savor this wild night out in Rome. Never have we been more in need of such an opulent means of escape. Just go watch it, you’ll thank me.