The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza)

This screening took place on Sunday, April 27, 2014 at 9:00 pmYukon Arts Centre

Winner of Best Foreign Language Film, Academy Awards 2014. Journalist Jep Gambardella (the dazzling Toni Servillo, Il divo and Gomorrah) has charmed and seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades. Since the legendary success of his one and only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city's literary and social circles, but when his sixty-fifth birthday coincides with a shock from the past, Jep finds himself unexpectedly taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries, and looking past the extravagant nightclubs, parties, and cafés to find Rome in all its glory: a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty. This stunning film has been rightly compared to the best works of Fellini and suggests a return to the greatness of Italian cinema in the 20th Century. "The story of Jep’s plush detachment from the real world, and the crisis of soul he’d have if he could be certain he had a soul, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is an utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty that evokes Fellini’s La Dolce Vita by way of Baz Luhrmann. Indeed, so removed are these people from the real world below them, you wonder if you’re not watching a movie about people already dead but too rich to notice." - Geoff Pevere, Globe and Mail 3.5 out of 4 stars In Italian w/ English subtitles