Category: Film Review

As this nerd’s tribute to another nerd, I left my desk this morning to ride Bus 352 to the Chauvel theatre in Paddington to see Roger Ebert in ‘Life Itself.’

A movie is a machine for transmitting empathy by telling the stories of other people, of other times, and of other places … and there we find something of ourselves and we experience it in the silent company of hundreds of others. No, we are not alone. Call that an Ebertism. I am sure he said something like that but I could not track it down.
The movie chronicles Ebert from cradle to grave, the small town mid-western only child who made his way in the big wide world. At the University of Illinois he worked his way up to editor the ‘Illini Daily’ where he rose to the occasion in November 1963. (By the way, I loved seeing that two-storey printing presses, the rumble of which is heard streets away.)
The essential loneliness of the man is inescapable in his earlier years, here portrayed as his salad days, the life of the party with no home and no one to go home to, drinking all night and eating like a pig, and he poured himself into his typewriter.
That Ebert was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his movie reviews is noted and mentioned a couple of times, but nothing is said about why he got it. A quotation from the citation would have been valuable. It was remarkable that a film reviewer would receive such an accolade. Still is.

One of the major themes has to be the odd coupling with Gene Siskel. They were from different worlds, and found little in common. If they bickered on screen, they positively reviled one another off it. Though even some of that seemed forced yet it was amusing to watch the out-takes, boys being bad boys because it was expected of them.
Film literati never accepted Ebert and hated the influence he gained with audiences and indeed directors and studios. His most egregious failing was that he did not write in the inscrutable, closed, self-referential way beloved of Cultural Studies. I think of all those films made for other film directors lovingly reviewed in the ‘The Story of Film: an Odyssey’ (2011). (A documentary film reviewed elsewhere on the this blog.) Ebert cut through all of that.
Whenever I see a movie I like, I check the Ebert archive in the hope that he wrote about it, putting into words some of the things that occurred to me and, more importantly, putting into words things that did not occur to me at all.
This is the man who recognised Martin Scorsese’s genius in ‘I Call First’ (1967), who searched out and encouraged independent film makers like Errol Morris, reviewed documentaries as if they were feature film when other reviewers ignored documentaries, and made subtitled movies acceptable to an ever larger audience. Credit where credit it due.
By the way ‘I Call First’ was retitled ‘Who is that knocking at my door’ when it got a wide release thanks to Ebert’s push. His battles to review independent films with little or no theatrical release is more than enough to make the case that he expanded the realm, likewise, his thinly disguised efforts to review some obscure film three times to give it exposure. Siskel played a part in all of this, too, but is not given credit for it in these 120 minutes. No time, I guess. See my comment on length at the end.

Among the many likeable moments in the documentary are these:
Martin Scorsese’s perplexed reaction, even years later, to a bad review from Ebert was delicious. Not only did Ebert start Scorsese’s career but he resurrected it once, but even so he did not like ‘The Color of Money’ and said so.
The continental tensions with the rulers of popular culture in Los Angeles and New York City who ignored those two guys living in a movie house in Chicago for years and years. (I always thought they lived there anyway.)
His abiding loyalty to the working class ‘Chicago Sun Times’ and its readership even under the baleful influence of Rupert Murdoch’s ownership was staunch. It gave him his start and he repaid that everyday.
Werner Herzog’s description, delivered in the thick overcoat of a German accent, of Ebert as a comrade wounded in action who soldiers on was charming, grim, and exact.
Richard Corliss of ‘Time’ magazine eating the words of some of his early attacks on Ebert’s approach to reviewing. Too down market for the young Corliss. An older and wiser Corliss sees a bigger picture now, or having made his career, Corliss perhaps now has no need any longer to attract attention by attacking an established figure.
The recitation of the last page of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ‘Most of the shore places were now closed…[get it and read it for yourself].’ A dirge to be sure, but ‘Gatsby believed in the green light.’ So did Roger Ebert. Find and follow the green light….
Art mirrors life but it need not reproduce it, as Ebert said more than once. There was about 30 minutes too much of life in the film for this viewer, the grieving wife, the loving grandchildren, the lingering camera shot to wring every last drop of emotion from the take, enough already!
I enjoyed leaving my well beaten paths for a while today, but I won’t make a habit of it! I have footnotes to go and chapters to write before I play hookey again.

A Walter MItty story set in contemporary Montréal. Jean-Marc lives a downward spiral in a world that is collapsing all around. To escape he daydreams, nightdreams, afternoon dreams his life away, enduring an impossible job, a loveless marriage, a daily trek to be demeaned at the office while being incapable of assisting any taxpayer who comes to him for assistance. It is a well worn franchise, this story but it is handled with vigour and imagination. If the whole does not compute, many of the parts are great fun, some of them instantly recognisable.

For instance, the committee meeting of ten to explain to Jean-Marc that ‘negro’ is a non-word in his first official disciplinary warning. The elaborate methods of the smokers to avoid the anti-smoking patrols. Yes, security guards with dogs on anti-smoking patrols. Then there is the singular Montréal touch, that Olympic stadium white elephant. Though no government in fifty (50) years has a found a use for that monument to the ego of Mayor Jean Drapeau, Denys Arcand has: government social services offices.

Why not, a billion tax dollars went into that monstrosity at the end of the metro. It is has been cited in every other Olympic bid as an example of what not to do.
Of course the functionaries have little time to deliver social services since they are constantly in meetings to hammer each other very politely with a host of conflicting and contradictory rules, to be motivated even if depressed and dispirited by Humour Quebec, to be trained in the latest trivial tweak to the meaningless rules, planning how to cut the next budget, and scheduling the next meetings. See, I said instantly recognisable.
His daydreams about revenge on his line manager and the supervisor….
The prince’s minions at work.
Well that prince of equatorial origin is famous for his cruelty. Seeing a Roman emperor dragging on a cigarette, that is worth the price of admission.
His imaginary girlfriend’s anger at being the dream girl for such a loser, ouch, that hurt! But she did not seem to mind his other fantasy women.
The harem.
The high-powered wife is a caricature, to be sure, but then so is everything and everyone else. The news on the radio, television, and newspapers is one downer after another. Everyone wears surgical masks in public because of an unfathomable disease that the authorities cannot control. The commuter train, which breaks down everyday, is repaired by the driver with a sledge hammer. The metro is packed with unpleasant people. Criminals with guns are released on technicalities that no one understands. Gangs roam the streets at night. The sky will be falling soon. This is not a Montréal for tourists.
Perhaps thanks to a chance meeting with another fantasist, and more importantly the death of his mother, Jean-Marc is jarred out of his mind world. He leaves home just when his wife returns. I started to type ‘estranged’ wife but their relationship is not close enough to become estranged. He banishes his dream girl with the recriminations of a long married couple. By the way the earlier shower scene with the reference to American film classifications lets us all in on the joke.
Denys Arcand gesturing. A great talent, this one with a string of thoughtful and memorable films including ‘Jesus of Montréal,’ ‘Decline of the American Empire,’ and ‘The Barbarian Invasion.’
Recorded from SBS and watched later. The title ‘L’Âge des ténébres’ is literally the Dark Ages, but for reasons best know to themselves the SBS producers called it ‘Days of Darkness.’

Bletchley Park first was unknown, then a curiosity, a historical drama, and now a fantasyland.
Bletchley Park, now open to the public.
It remained secret for most of the Cold War, then a little information became available in the 1960s, then a lot more in the 1980s, and now the facts no longer constrain the story teller. ‘Enigma’ in 2001 was one take on it, a drama with a tortured performance from Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet playing against type. It was perplexing and rousing.

In 1968 Dirk Bogarde ran the show in ‘Sebastian’ with understated panache.

’The Bletchley Circle’ has also been on the small screen, which after a great start descended to the average, emphasising special effects over intellectual content.

We dithered about going to ‘The Imitation Game.’ Seeing man’s inhumanity to man, well, we could see that on the television news any day. Huh? The publicity emphasised the abuse of Turing for his homosexuality; no doubt this was done to martyr him, but it put us off. For a while.
Bletchley Park, I had to see that again. Nerds winning the war! Near sighted, stoop shouldered, shuffling wallflowers with bad table manners, I could identify with them! Sorry Brad Pitt but you are not in my league.
The importance of codes and decoding has a long history to be sure. There is that Zimmerman telegram of 1917, a coded German message to Mexico that was intercepted and decoded and gave the United States a push into the war. More on the Zimmerman letter at the end. Read on.
To compare ‘Enigma’ to ‘The Imitation Game’, a few points standout. ‘Enigma’ showed Bletchley Park to be the gigantic factory it was, employing in 1944 about 12,000 people. The Bletchley Park’ of ‘The Imitation Game’ is confined to less than a dozen people with a few CGI backgrounds. In ‘The Imitation Game’ Commander Alastair Denniston is a foolish martinet, played to a ‘T’ by Charles Dance, but in fact he was the one who decided very early that code breaking in this war required mathematicians and engineers. In earlier years, decoding had been the province of linguists and translators. Not this time. Likewise, running crossword puzzle competitions to recruit personnel was his, not Turing’s, brainchild. Nor do I think the beard is right for 1942. None of the pictures I could find show him with a beard in the 1940s.
Colossus was indeed a digital computer but it was neither designed nor used by Turing but by others. Turing devised and built another device, but the film is ‘based on a true story’ so the slather is open.
Many reviewers have focused on Turing’s homosexuality, and it certainly was the man. For the one-eyed there is not enough emphasis on that, no doubt, but to this viewer it seemed partly anachronistic, i.e., the references were too explicit for the time when homosexuality was the love that did not (dare) speak its name. The very word itself in 1942 would have not always been understood. Having said that, there was plenty of emphasis on it, though Turing suffered also from autism, and code-breaker he might be, but he could not see double meanings in conversation, a fact that is very nicely presented in the scene in the pub. There was also paranoia in the mix.
There is no historical reason to believe that Turing made any decisions about the use of the material. Disclosure by using the intelligence, this was a command decision made at the very top. though Turing may have realised the implications of acting on the information but it hardly seems consistent with his complete self-absorption most of the time. Making a member of the inner circle, who apparently does nothing, a relative of a sailor on a convoy was a very midday soap opera touch. Every ship had brothers and sons on it, a good many wives, sisters, and daughters, too. ‘Enigma’ plays this straight and the result is all the more powerful when the senior naval officer implicitly orders his men to their deaths for the greater cause.
It seems very unlikely to me that a one page letter from Turing to Churchill would have uncorked a £100,000. Perhaps Leo Szilard, Churchill’s science advisor, interceded, but we will never know in ‘The Imitation Game’ where Turing is the singular Atlas on whose shoulders the world rests. On the same page the confrontation after the door is kicked in seems almost childish in its resolution where the messenger from the Home Office without word of dialogue has the authority to nod to a six month extension but mutely accepts a one month edict instead. Hello! It does not work anything like that.
Turing did write to Churchill at one point to ask for more clerical staff, and Churchill did reply immediately for ‘Action this day.’ Based on a true story they say. Hmm.
I found the chopping back and forth through time from 1928 to 1942 to 1955 confusing and distracting. The only reason the schooldays of 1928 were there in the end was to explain the name Christopher on the last contraption Turing built. It was unnecessary to the story.
Benedict Cumberbatch strives to save the day and nearly does. He does not need that backstory of 1928 to be confused, arrogant, inept, autistic, brilliant, frightened, determined, lost, secretive, brassy, paranoid, unpredictable, lonely in a crowd, and more. He did them all by turns and at times a couple at once, riveting.
Alan Turing
The female lead by comparison goes through the motions without ever quite inhabiting the part, made more difficult for being underwritten. She becomes nothing more than a plot device. Joan Clarke in fact became Deputy Head of Hut 8 which housed the first Colossus, but you’d never know it in ‘The Imitation Game.’ And she did not secure this position by patronage from Turing, to be clear. By the way she wore glasses, as did Kate Winslet in ‘Enigma.’ Hooray for Four Eyes!
The idea that the air is full of secrets is quite an idea and I wished the film makers had scrapped the CGI warfare, which was uniformly poorly done, for something creative. Would there not be a way to show those messages passing through the air like tracers and being netted at British listening stations. Now that would excite any viewer. Maybe something like this map of transponders on European air traffic.

There are several scenes of Turing running and he was a Olympic class distance runner, who failed in an Olympic try out because of an injury. One of his many personal eccentricities was to run to London for meetings, carrying a back pack with clothes. Another was to chain his perfectly ordinary tea mug to the radiator.
The imitation game is still a test for artificial intelligence pretty much as described in the police interview room where Turing breaks the Official Secrets Act he signed in 1939 to tell the plod all.
The Zimmerman telegram was decoded and acted upon in 1917 by a team that included Alastair Denniston. A feeble effort was made to hide its source, and the Germans continued to use the same code. More intelligence from broken codes was used, and the German continued to use it. Even when the pretence of hiding the sources was dropped, they continued to use it. Why? Because it was a German code and so it was the best. It was unbreakable, despite the evidence that by the middle of 1918 the Allies were reading every radio message. See Barbara Tuchman’s marvellous book ‘The Zimmerman Telegram’ (1985) for tale of his Teutonic arrogance and folly matched only by that of the United States.

Another little gem from SBS Television, this one from France.
A la suite d’un accident de voiture, Arthur est plongé pendant quelques heures dans un coma. Durant sa phase d’éveil, dans un délire verbal, il exprime des phrases incohérentes qui trouvent leurs racines directement dans son inconscient. A son réveil, il est face à une curieuse énigme : Que faisait-il la nuit sur cette route, proche de Cherbourg?

The title is perfect, once you get it, and as soon as it is said it clicks. The Black Box, c’est toi. Nice, very nice. The layers of reality and illusion are nicely done and the preoccupation with the brother begins to seem strange, and it is.
At first it seemed to be the story of an amnesiac who sets out to investigate himself, to recover his memory, as in a detective story, but it drifts away from that to science fiction or fantasy with the masked ninja. Even so, compelling viewing. It remains a study of unresolved guilt and obsession unleashed. Perhaps the larger purpose is to challenge the borders between reality and illusion but it does not succeed at that.
Juan Garcia’s many transformations from bland, sad, angry, confused, disoriented, lost, forgiving are worth the 90 minutes. He is in virtually every scene and carries the film. He is a superb actor and when we watched another SBS movie later I missed his depth, variation, and intensity compared to the callow actors in the next film who were so clearly going through the motions. Garcia believes what he is doing and makes the viewer believe it, too.
I recorded it because I saw that Richard Berry was the director and that it featured the ever versatile Juan Garcia.
Garcia I got to know when he played Adamsberg in a film based on one of Fred Vargas’s superb novels, altogether very fine that one,’Pars vite et reviens tard’ (2007) from ‘Have mercy on us all.’ That title in French is an idiom like ‘scoot and come back later’, and has nothing to do with the title of the book which is the same in both languages. Go figure. I cannot think of English equivalent to this idiom, though no doubt there is one I just cannot recall.
Richard Berry took his place in my mental pantheon with ‘C’est la vie’ (1990), another gem, directed by Diane Kurys, in which he played one of the parents, with only one scene but that was cut glass. I have kept my eye out for him ever since. He has a long list of credits including “Tais-Toi’ (2003).
The tag line on the poster above, ‘it is necessary to forget’ is perfect. It also reminds me of that old maxim that successful people have short memories. They forget their failures and mistakes and keep going. Selective memories is more accurate, but the point is not to dwell on mistakes, errors, and failures, and to keep going. When you quit, the others win.
I see that on the IMDB ‘La Boîte Noire’ scores a miserly 5.8/10. Well that confirms a conviction that most people do not recognise quality.

It has fifteen parts and is currently being aired on Studio TV. We have watched three episodes with great interest, and occasional comprehension.
What we like is the low-key presentation and comments, the worldwide scope from Zimbabwe to Afghanistan and the generosity of spirit that underlies both. All so rare on the air these days when shouting replaces thought, when the crass drives out all else, and the relentless me-focus shrinks the world, and that is on the the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)!

The most recent episode was an account of the last days of celluloid filmmaking before the CGIs (Computer Generated Images) conquered all.
Among those in the spotlight were Lars von Trier one whose films deadened me when I was a film festivalian, but he gave a modest and cogent explanation for his approach, as did some others, though none of it encouraged me to watch their films. They make ‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’ (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961) seem like an action movie! It is all so intellectual, dessicated, retentive, inward, abstract, meta, self-referential, reflexive, slow … well you get the idea by now or you never will. Gone are plot and character, gone are place and time, and with them, meaning. Instead the images on the screen are to trigger some unconscious response in the viewer. Uh huh… Well, unconscious anyway.
However, the broader theme was that actors are human beings and CGIs are not. Accordingly, Mark Cousins featured directors who concentrated on film characters as human beings. They have imperfect bodies, which age, sag, and sometimes let them down. (Amen.) They also have emotions that cannot be articulated in an six-second scream but have to have portrayed. (For an example, BCGI (Before CGI) recall Steve McQueen, without a word, bouncing the ball off the wall in ‘The Great Escape’ [1963].)
Tsai Ming-liang, a Taiwanese director, had some insightful things to say, and talked mainly about his ‘Vive l’Armour‘ (1994). His comment on the Hollywood fetish of CGI concerned the deadening effect of the screen busy with multitudes of CGIs from spaceships, endless weapons, to vampires, and a deafening surround soundtrack. Sadly that is too often true.
Tsai Ming-liang
Cousins focussed on the last scene in ‘Vive l’Armour’ where a distressed young woman cries, and cries, and keeps crying in an exhausting (to watch) seven-minute take. Emotions engulf and cannot be switched on and off, that is the point. I appreciated that argument intellectually, but I confess it did not inspire me to sit through any of his work.
Here she is.
As said above, I found much of the material covered in this segment, as in some of the others, to be inward looking, made only for other directors, not an audience. Though much was said about humanity in the program, it seemed there was little for the actors to do but stand in front of the camera. These directors often prefer a single handheld camera, cutting the cost of elaborate camera work, producing little more than a home movie to my eye. The director is the auteur who creates everything, when everything else has been discarded, the actor is the last prop. More than once Von Trier has done films without sets, leaving only actors. Maybe next he will dispense with them, too. That would leave the director doing a selfie into the camera, which some of these films seem to be anyway.

“The Caine Mutiny” (1954) at the Dendy Quay on the very wide screen.

What a treat! A great cast, a rattling story, superb performances, starting with the conscience-stricken Executive Officer Steve Maryk played by Van Johnson (showing the scars on his face of a car accident before filming started). José Ferrer does a star turn in the last segment (with a bandaged hand, a result of a sporting injury off the set). These blemishes add to the authentic feel of the movie. Fred McMurry, E. G. Marshall, Claude Atkins, Lee Marvin, Tom Tully, James Best, and more offer chiseled performances.
But none can match Bogart when he testifies. No rolling of eyes, no histrionics, no drooling, none of that Jack Nicholson stuff. Click, click, click go the ball bearings as he goes off the deep end, and then, oops, tries to pull back, but it is too late – the Mad Hatter has been seen by one and all. It is the one scene everyone remembers.

Bogart said he never did understand Queeg so he just did what the director, Edward Dmytryk, told him to do. Ever the professional Bogart did it well for a short guy with bad teeth, a receding hair line, and a weak chin. No matinee idol good looks had he. He’d never make it today in Hollywood.
The film is much more focussed than Herman Wouk’s novel, which wanders all over the landscape of the civilian lives of the officers and men, yet the film did seem long to me at 124 minutes. The ingenue Mr Keith seemed an unnecessary distraction, though perhaps he is what Maryk was two years earlier. But his mother, his girl friend, his immaturity are annoying. While in the cutting room I would also have cut some of the repeated vistas of the mighty U.S. Navy and the repeated passages under the Golden Gate Bridge.
The film is a set of character studies, of Queeg, the worn out captain, of Maryk the Executive Officer in over his head, the glib but spineless would-be novelist played to a T by Fred McMurray, the defense lawyer who knows the mutineers were both right and wrong, and the ingenue.
For all of that I see that the imbecile factor is such that it rates a 7.9 on the IMDB just ahead of some of Adam Sandler’s films, a benchmark for puerile nonsense.

This film comes from Chile and offers an account of the advertizing campaign that unseated the Pinochet dictatorship.

To placate world opinion in 1988 (perhaps in anticipation of the medical care that tyrant might one day need, and mindful of the example of the Shah of Iran in 1977) the dictator of Santiago decided to stage manage a plebiscite.
It was contrived to insure a victory. The proposition was a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the continuation of the one-man rule of Pinochet.

Pinochet
The graylings of the regime assumed (1) ‘Yes’ could not lose on such an All or Nothing vote and (2) the many opposition parties would never unite but would rather tear themselves apart, confusing and repelling votes by the ever more holy competition among themselves. As additional insurance the campaigning was be limited to two 15 minutes time slots on the television every day. The ‘Yes’ segment to be aired first in prime time. The ‘No’ segment at 11 pm, when honest workers should be asleep. Finally, leaving nothing to chance the voting day and poll hours were chosen to minimize turnout. Begins to sound like Georgia.  

As much by accident as design one of the opposition parties hired an advertizing consultant who in time shapes a very simple, very direct, very funny set of television advertizements.

The ad man is reluctant to be hired, the money is laughable, the people are tiresome, it threatens his place in society and the firm to consort with such outsiders. He is threatened and yet, well, his father was exiled, friends from university disappeared, and he feels the pall that hangs over the past, so he took it on after hours.

Then there are the committee meetings. My god, I thought I had endured Dante’s committees, but these surpassed even Mr. Aligheri’s curriculum meetings. They are Olympian in scope, starting at 8 p.m. and going on and on and on, as everyone present airs every grievance they have against the regime with the demand that it be included in every installment of the 15 minute episodes. It is attrition by the self righteous.

There is indeed no agreement among the many opposition groups, several of which depart in moral outrage and make their own episodes, 15 minutes of a very sincere talking head putting any hapless viewer into a trance. Some of the programs seem like televised therapy for the talking head. ‘Now is my chance to tell my story of trial and suffering to indict this despicable regime.’ Others dwell on stern didactic messages documenting the many misdeeds of the past, and there were many, in mind-numbing detail.

The fact that it is all true does not make it either good television or good advertizing.

This is the lesson some of the opposition leaders have to learn and it is an emotionally hard lesson to realize that today’s generation does not much care about the dark deeds of the past. [Pause and consider how much Reader you really care about the dark deeds done in the 1950s and 1960s to aboriginals by people who are still alive and to whom you politely yield your seat on the bus.]
The final indignity to those who had so long risked life and limb to resist the Pinochet dictatorship and its willing thugs was the advertizing jiggle, calculated to catch on! What they wanted was a stirring anthem, what they got was a 30 second lilt!

By the way, the No vote was 55% and the Yes 45% in a 97.5% turnout! Having invited the world media to witness the affirmation of the Pinochet regime, the outcome could not be concealed, but instead led to constitutional revisions that in time eventuated in a reformed regime. (Stan Freberg always said advertising worked, and he was right!)

I am not quite sure what conclusion to draw. Are voters so fickle that a catchy tune sways them? Is voting just another product?

Or, are people motivated more by the future, which was the focus of the episodes? Are viewers more receptive to a message delivered with wit and good humour than one presented in self-righteous hellfire and brimstone?

What I got out of it can be summed up in this way, ‘It is not about me.’ That was the mistake so many of those oppositionists made, too much about me, my suffering, my tears, my journey, my commitment, my sincerity, my trials. Just another kind of self-centred self-absorption that is rife everywhere.

By the way those committee meetings are still going on. The Wikipedia entry for the film and the IMDB page are replete with combatants still claiming that everyone else was wrong!

A sports documentary like no other!
The film tracks eight (8) players making their way to the World Table Tennis championships.
That sounds conventional and boring. NOT!
These athletes, both women and men, are each 80 or older, well Dot of Australia owns up to 100. The Germans Inge and Ursula are in their 90s, Inge having found that her ping-pong training seems to stave off dementia. Rune from Norway jogs to keep fit at 85. Sun from Mongolia is not sure whether he is 82 or 83, the papers having been burned long ago by the invaders, either Chinese, Japanese, or Russian. Who can say?

Les has been devoted to body building since he left the RAF and never misses a chance for press ups, or cleaning and jerking twice his own weight! Terry has been repeatedly told he has only a week to live for the past two championships, but there he is, at the bell with paddle in hand.
Then there is that self-described reverse Marshall Plan, the wise-cracking Viennese from Texas Lisa (85) who wants to be first and best at everything! She may have only 1/8th of the camera time but she steals the show and wins the women’s final in a walk. Terry feels a failure when he finishes second, but looks forward to next year, just to prove those doctors wrong.
Les, in between reps in the gym, composes poems about life, nature, and people. Sun decides he has to change his training to compete. Lisa searches for a spot on the mantle to display her latest triumph.
What a crew!

When reviewers do not know where to start a review, they sometimes start by slagging off at other reviews. In that spirit I recall a review of an exhibition of Impressionist paintings complaining that it was too French; another that faulted a film about cricket for too many references to cricket. Then there are film reviews that find Hollywood movies so American. I can say, without fear of contradiction that ‘The Great Beauty’ is very Italian. That is why we went; to see some of Italy without the travel.

‘La grande bellezza’ poster
The film features that greatest of Italian film stars: Roma itself.
The other actors, fine though they be, are supporting players to this great star with its architecture, its lavish art works, its vistas, its history evoking buildings, it inspiring sunsets and ravishing sunrises, its profligate statuary, its intimate chapels and by-ways, its grande boulevardes, its…. Well, one sees the point by this time, or will never see it. The film is a paean to Roma.
Jep, played superbly by a very serious actor Toni Servillo, has frittered away his talent as a novelist along with his humanity, by living the indolent life Roma offered him with a spacious apartment overlooking the Colosseum, bedding so many willing women that he has long since lost count, rising at 3 pm on many days to party the night away. His being is certainly light in the sense of Milan Kundera’s ‘the lightness of being.’ To reach for another metaphor, it is the ‘feathered life,’ as the Aztecs offered their sacrificial victims before the knife. I read it as a character study but he could be taken as an exemplar of the milieu in which he swims, and thus the film offers some social criticism, too.
Sounds familiar? Yes, ‘La Dolche Vita’ (1960) comes to mind and there are many fountains. By the way, ‘La Dolche Vita’ is thirty (30) minutes longer than ‘La grande bellezza,’ which is listed at 142 minutes. Yet it held our attention as did ‘La Dolche Vita.’ Confession, one also thinks Silvio Berlusconi who defies parody. Then there is Fellini’s own ‘Roma’ (1972) with the Master’s taste for disconnection and the grotesque.
‘La grande bellezza’ has many tributes to Federico Felllini in its tableaux, its return to the sea, and — it has to be said — the dwarf, who here is a real person, not a circus prop, and even a giraffe, a knife thrower, performance art, and on and on.
Jep at 65 is bored, bored, bored, bored; he is also sometimes boring. He lives like a king, dresses like a prince, wanders the haut monde with nary a care in the world, except the dawning realization of his mortality. Jaded, cynical, and worn he is, yet he is not bitter, not angry, not a victim. But he is defeated. He wrote one novel forty (40) years ago, yet he still occasionally meets people who quote from it. He brushes off their admiration and when they ask him about another, second novel he is so long-practiced at diversion that the question does break his emotional skin. Instead he writes witty fluff for a newspaper which must pay him way over the odds so he can afford all those perfectly tailored 3,000 thread-count suits he wears.
It is all trip and no arrival. Much happens, but nothing matters. A tourist faints. Is that part of the story? It is not part of Jep’s story, no, but it is part of Roma’s story. A young man is killed in a car crash, or kills himself by crashing his car and either way drugs may have been involved. His life does not go on, but Roma’s does. One of Jep’s girlfriends dies and he hardly notices. He goes on … for now. Roma goes on forever.
In addition to the gorgeous photography of Roma in its many faces there is a wondrous array of music — some ethereal, some energising, some reassuring, and some that sounds like a train wreck — in the soundtrack, and all the Milano style in the clothes on the actors. Though in Roma the Milano labels would be cut out. Eye and ear candy supreme.
For the viewer it is two and half hours spent following a camera around Roma over the shoulder of a wastrel named Jep. The camera is at times sinuous, at other time inert, then it seems to dart through the air, or float over the Tiber. However, Jep, no fool, is completely self-aware and perhaps he may yet try to write another novel, but probably not. It makes no matter to Roma.

Tony Servillo as Jep
I refered to Toni Servillo as a serious actor because I have seen him many times before, including as the very humane detective in ‘The Girl by the Lake’ (2007), a surprising story of what people will do for love. He also directed ‘Propaganda’ (1979) and ‘Guernica’ (1985). Both as serious as the titles suggestion. Though he smoked enough cigarettes in this film to reduce his chances of doing much more work.