After watching Sorrentino's "City of Absolute Beauty", it's like watching a lengthy and gorgeous MTV. You don't know what you're watching, but you don't know why you're full of melancholy.
Even if the storyline is like the "nothing book" that Flaubert wanted to write, you do feel something. Those magnificent images, melancholy melodies, vague emotions, incomprehensible dialogues... all directly refer to the title of the film "La grande Bellezza" (The Great Beauty).
Absolute beauty - beauty is nothingness, beauty is subjective, can beauty be described?
Sorrentino did it, and "The Beautiful City" is the most beautiful poem he wrote.
Poetry is the expression of beauty. You can translate it into other languages and other forms of expression, but you cannot translate the rhythm and rhythm of beauty. You can only understand that the ineffable beauty is the resonance between the poet and the reader.
When asked by a 104-year-old nun, Jep, a 65-year-old writer who had been out of writing, why he stopped writing, he said: "I was looking for something better, but I didn't find it."
What are better things?
Facing the eternal city of Rome, Japanese tourists fell to the ground and died; every night at the party, everyone lived a savage life; the performance artist who grabbed the wall with his head, can't tell what the resonance is; the stripping for living itself The dancing girl Ramona; the angry girl forced to paint; the rhetorical cardinal; the nun who climbed on her knees to St. John's Cathedral...
These fragmented and obscure life scenes make up the entire film, and people don't know what to say. The protagonist Jep is the bystander of all this, he watches the hypocrisy and fragility of human beings; he tastes the wine that stops love; he indulges his sensuality and withdraws from it; he sleeps staring at the ceiling every day, imagining that it is a calm sea...
In fact, it all originated from one night when Jep was 18 years old. Elisa, the love of his life, said that he wanted to show him something. He saw her body and saw the beauty greater than his life, but Elisa left him, The last time I heard of her was her death.
From 18 years old to 65 years old, 47 years have passed, Jep has been unable to write down the beauty in his heart. He hesitated because of the emptiness of life, and because of the ethereal beauty, people could not break the shackles of death, and could not surpass the beauty of beauty. Perspective, just as we all ride on a train that can't go anywhere, we can't write a beautiful grand.
All of this is like the night when Su Zi and Ke were paddling under the red cliffs.
I mourn the fleeting moment of my life, and envy the infinity of the Yangtze River. Carrying Fei Xian to travel, holding the bright moon and dying forever. Knowing that it is impossible to get it suddenly, the entrusting legacy is resounding in the sad wind.
The limitations and sorrows of human beings are no different from ancient and modern.
At the end of the story, the nun, aged like a walnut, asks Jep: Do you know why I only eat the roots of plants? Jep said he didn't know.
"Because roots are important."
It turns out that all difficult and obscure questions have a simple and straightforward answer.
"Usually the end of things is death, but first there will be life, hidden in this and that, and I can't say enough. In fact, it has already settled in the noise. Silence is emotion, and love is also fear. The beautiful light, Wild and impermanent. Those hard, miserable and painful human nature are buried under the embarrassment of being born as a human being, and I can't say enough about it, but it's just glitz, I don't care about glitz, so... This is the beginning of the novel, and finally . . . it's just a trick, yes, just a trick."
In the end, we will all find the same explanation for life that ends in the same way. Between life and death, gorgeousness and decadence, between the embarrassment of being a human being and the dignity of being a human being, there will always be a glimpse of the beauty of human beings.
As Dostoevsky said: Love life more than its meaning.
View more about The Great Beauty reviews