Winner of the Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Academy Awards, from a visual perspective The Great Beauty couldn't have been named any better. Every shot is lovingly composed and photographed with a painterly eye, lit like an old masterpiece; each camera movement a graceful, perfectly judged glide through the scene. It's a near-perfect marriage of cinematography, direction and location achieving a visual splendour few films ever attain. Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) wrote a great novel once, but it was a long time ago. Most of his life has been spent earning a comfortable living writing about cultural and - far more importantly - mingling in the milieu of the Roman intelligentsia and artists. But the life of empty hedonism surrounded by self-important, vacuous socialites and their endless pontificating starts to wear thin, and that something of true beauty is needed to deliver him some sense of fulfillment. Paulo Sorrentino had already shown with his previous films his innate talent for virtuoso direction, but The Great Beauty takes it to another level. The opening party scene alone demonstrates a flair equally on a par with the likes of Scorsese (and you can forget out Baz Luhrmann), and while the film doesn't quite attain the same level of probity of a man in crisis as there was in Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (with which this film has been compared), it evokes a man going through internal crisis with more style than most movies could ever hope for.
