Italian Film Festival NZ Palmerston - The Great Beauty

The Great Beauty / La Grande Bellezza

The Great Beauty is Paolo Sorrentino’s powerful and evocative tale of hedonism and lost love, and an extraordinary depiction of contemporary Rome – where life is a performance, and the city its stage.
65-year-old Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) is a jaded journalist and wealthy bon vivant whose early promise as a novelist has never been fulfilled, though his infamy remains. He lives in a luxurious apartment overlooking the Colosseum and is a regular of Rome’s party circuit for the elite, a never-ending nocturnal parade of decadence that rages through antique palaces, immense villas and opulent terraces around the Eternal City.

“You’d be hard pressed to find a more stunning, thoughtful, honest and stirring film than The Great Beauty” - The Reader

“A visual feast, one of the relatively few films that takes full advantage of the extraordinary, almost hallucinatory beauty of Rome” - NY Review Of Books