On the first viewing I cried a little, on the second I cried a lot :-) and I experienced it precisely like a film "against" strong narratives, ideological and artistic epics. It is a theme that touches me deeply, because I do not believe in the epic; I am more a man of resignation, of noting the disaster. And Sorrentino, in my opinion, narrates a beautiful disaster, a quagmire of beauty, of enjoyment from which it is impossible to emerge except by living moments of surfacing, of next-level beauty, which in the case of Jep Gambardella is the memory of roots and the beginning of a new novel.
Watching the film, I thought of an MTV "clip" that I think captures the idea of "camp" very well: golden skulls covered in melted chocolate :-) camp is that kind of artistic current, or aesthetic ideal, that takes the idea of beauty without function to the extreme. Practically, it is a kitsch that knows it is kitsch and marches on the limit between very ugly and very beautiful. To make ourselves understood, Platinette is camp. And because she draws inspiration from "Divine," a famous chubby and fetishistic drag queen who became the muse of John Waters, the director of "Hairspray." The "plasticized" aesthetic of the '50s, that of housewives with teased hair, bright-colored clothes, shiny surfaces, is camp. In reality, all pop aesthetics are camp when they try to be extremely beautiful. Thus, The Great Beauty, in my opinion, adopts a camp aesthetic to describe a world in which art is forced to be super-extremely-beautiful, so super-extremely-beautiful that it makes no sense. Art, parties, clothes, social occasions, are all aestheticized to the limit. But this life, which should be wonderful, is actually empty of meaning, and everyone is looking—more or less—for something more.
The thing that I think disturbed many is that in recent years we have become convinced that rigidity must be opposed to excess. Most of my friends who hated the film feel within themselves the failure of the leftist intellectual, of the girl who in the film would want to be so pure as to oppose civil struggle against senseless beauty. But it is a failure, just as it is a failure for the boy who reads Proust and Turgenev and commits suicide. It is also a failure for Romano (Verdone) who returns to Nepi because Rome disappointed him. The only truly pure character, the Saint, is ridiculous and completely unapproachable, because poverty is lived, not recounted! I liked her immensely as a character, and many of my friends didn't even understand her. If you have ever seen Pirandello's "If It Is So (You Call It) Real," you understood the Saint :-) she is the truth, she is the final enigmatic deus ex machina. Which, I repeat, is so pure as to be incomprehensible, and anyway ridiculous or, using a Pirandellian term, grotesque. We are terrified by her purity.
In all this bogged-down beauty, there are moments of surfacing. These are the dawns and the monuments of Rome, above all, the situations in which Jep cries, the memories of lost love. This is beauty that resists, locked away in the palaces of princesses or in our memories. Or, as in the case of the poor Colonna di Reggio, simultaneously locked away in the palace and in their memories. The scene of the old woman looking at her cradle is tremendous...
