Paolo Sorrentino
La Grande Bellezza

 "Move in the indistinct repetition of an expired time, drawing substance even from the void" (V. G.)

Rewatching Sorrentino's film on TV, gradually an impression became a lake among my thoughts, leading me to revisit the reviews already written, especially that of Suonoonous (which I partially share) and to produce some additional considerations on the matter.

The television viewing, besides breaking the film (making it, if possible, even more static and bland), adds something thematic and explanatory, namely: advertising … a factor that provides a definitive and by no means residual key to reading the film.
Between new promotions by phone companies, various food products, and more or less original slogans, at a certain point, during a break past the halfway point of the film, the same Neapolitan director materializes, who aboard a Fiat 500 speeds through the streets of some U.S.A. city, then, getting out of the tiny "Italian" car, casts an intense spermatological gaze toward the camera, and below appears the phrase: “Little Big Italian Beauty” (or something similar) … at that point, the urge to change the channel, to outright turn off, to begin random copulations, as well as new oneiric readings interspersed with holistic sessions, could reasonably take over, but in that case, I wouldn't have written these useless lines, and you wouldn't be here reading them now …
The question indeed arises spontaneously, for what reason did a director, fresh from an Oscar, sell out to advertising, using as a bargaining weapon what cannot be denied to have become his most famous and important work?!
To try to understand, let's abandon the fact that Sorrentino might not be humanly exhilarating, let's distance ourselves from the awareness that money exerts an almost unavoidable power on the human mind, let's also accept that at the base of art, almost always, its commodification is included … but still, the picture would not be complete… it is necessary to wait for the final part, that stage trick that makes the giraffe disappear, leaving the city to Verdone, which divides the finale into a double scenario: on one side the sacred stairway, where the super-old nun slowly crawls to her ecstatic bliss, and on the other, the ascent of the island where Jep rediscovers the “beauty” of his past …
In "absentia" of a change of pace, of genuine signs of tangible humanity, here the connection reveals itself, and it is represented by the inconclusiveness and inconsistency that envelops characters and situations, on the surface and not only … the absolute vacuity of the grand slides on the Eternal City, similar to tourist postcards, proposed as a Trojan horse to the national-popular spectator, almost sanctifying the golden age of our homeland…
The trompe-l'œil only dims caustically in the soliloquies, when the protagonist, the devout Servillo always faithful to himself and coated in a Lapo Elkann-style wardrobe, walks through often deserted streets at night, only in these sporadic moments does the sensation perceived by the receiver echo the real substance of the message.
The rest is “'Na Grande Presa per culo” as Venditti would say (who is significantly also materialized physically on set), a nice “Bitter Fruit” that the director gives as a professional farewell to our Country, packaging it in an extremely cunning and stunningly sly way, distributing gigs left and right ... e.g., the end credit images, or Serena Grandi faithful to her figure of a fallen Italian Icon (in drugs), the Ferilli and Verdone Romans of Rome, the random flaunting of artistic beauties or those registered trademarks shown with a very little auteur’s aloofness …
The film itself is a Big Gig, and the Oscar its compensation … the aforementioned appearance in the director’s commercial reiterates the coherence of this dissimulated intent, of this static and disdainful lack of depth, within which art and beauty are as current as the rubble of the Colosseum standing in front of Jep’s balcony … it is also a way to relegating the film to the rank of mere barter goods, of a commercial product that cannot have Felliniesque, "Scorzesque" authorial aspirations nor the stature of a Herzog, and from which its creator seems to want to quickly detach, having fully collected the stakes.
In light of all this, the proliferation of uncomfortable comparisons or improbable space-time connections (which even some "art film criticism" has intertwined in the sharp dismissal of the film), makes one smile. Defining Sorrentino naive in this "representation" is doing him an immense favor, it means having fully fallen into it, as well as wanting to seek some "Promethean Leap" (just writing it creates a bad image, let alone thinking it) within a film deliberately flattened on itself, only then to say that everything resolves into clamorous falls ... affirmations and critical stylistic positions which in themselves have a more than plausible logical semantic background, it must be clear... but that, within the Great densely depopulated plain of this "Beauty," appear as a sought-after onanistic exercise that feeds on an obviously self-referential pleasure.  
From the title onward, lofty yet apocryphal, the film feeds on its own aridity, but these substantial shortcomings and defects are the strength of the film, are the element that makes it a terribly successful film, the measure of this success does not rest so much on the received awards but in the glaring "misunderstanding" generated. For example, messages of congratulations, steeped in tricolor pride, arrived from the high echelons of the state to the Neapolitan director, a thing reminiscent of the thanks made by Reagan as President to Boss for writing "Born in the USA"... or the national debate on what is the Beauty that Sorrentino narrates in the film ... to then arrive at the most extreme dismissals on the altar of cinephilic art. A polysemic substratum generated from nothing, a thieving goal, a perfectly orchestrated diabolic revenge ... hence the wry smile during the commercial and the brazen face of the director on the Oscar stage with related Servillo's grins at his side.
No division between form and substance, because the pettiness and superficiality that the Sorrentino director irradiates to the horizon between human figures and physical spaces, begins and thanks initially the Sorrentino Fetish (Jep the Writer), almost a sort of admission of guilt. Moreover, these qualities do not deserve a plot that delves into the characters or their bond history, they deserve nothing more than a sterile, immobile backdrop crystallized in time, within which the search for truth is a mere and simple stratagem to deceive its passage, remaining on the surface, a way to continue to postpone an evolution that will not come and create only a "Great Trick" ... fooling those who at the end indicate this film as a possible booster to emerge from the crisis, but also those who declare themselves disappointed by a tone too "low," not worthy of the Promised Beauty.    

To derive a meaning, it would seem itself perfect in its absence.