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| It begins with a barbaric yawp. |
This beautiful film is an essay on, or better yet a contemplation of, creativity and its place in time, appropriately set in Rome. It begins with the protagonist’s milestone 65th birthday party and evolves into an exploration of energy, sex and ennui combined in coherent unison. Even funerals are not exempt from the Romantic. Funerals, after all, like all of Jep’s life, are theatre. The movie is replete with performance, art, and performance art. Of course Sorrentino pays homage to Fellini in any number of instances as we journey through Rome’s backways from Jep’s point of view. However, this is not the busy, smelly, carriage-car ridden Rome of Baedeker fame. Silence embraces the slight echoey sounds of water in fountains; you can almost taste the water, and feel it on your face. No one crosses a busy road, no horns are honking. No cars appear (except for one chauffeured vehicle with a Cardinal inside–faith always paired with decadence in Roma). As a matter of fact, aside from the Cardinal’s ride, we see only two symbols of modern technology: we see airplanes far, far, up in the sky; in that context, they take on the characteristics of birds and just blend in with the other natural settings (by “natural” we must, with some delight, include art and architecture). The other instance is during a flashback where Jep has a run-in with a motorboat. The homage is more 81/2 than La Dolce Vita but when a wild animal appears around a corner in the middle of a piazza, that image of striking juxtaposition from And the Ship Sails On, the one of the rhino on the boat, is evoked. Nevertheless, we can hardly be surprised when Alice’s Wonderland turns out a wonder or two.
Tempus fugit: When the hangover is done, Jep realizes that although time has passed, what has not been so obvious is that those images, people and events that have passed are truly gone and, with them, crucial parts of himself. Can he regain them? Can Time be regained? He spends many moments in this film with tears in his eyes (much like Proust’s protagonist in the novels I imagine). In a spoken word performance, one of his friends declares that there is nothing at all wrong with “nostalgia” — it’s the only thing left for those who have no faith in the future. Another friend has set up an exhibit of photographs in the midst of a gorgeous, grassy outdoor arena. As the sun shines on him, Jep peruses the thousands of small photos on the ancient walls. They are photos of his friend, taken by his father every day since he was born until the age of 14, and after that by himself. Not one day of his life is missed. What a brilliant metaphor: some photos have a smile, some are grim, some goofy, some sad looking, others just hung over or looking like shit. Forgotten days, yet so important in the moment. The only time we can possibly die is in the moment–the past deserves respect because we made it through that moment repeatedly. The point is emphasized by someone’s suicide: that soul did not survive the moment.
Love is paramount. Paramours are rife, but young, true, first love is still sacred in this picture full of sacred things and people, and sacrilege of same. When a man comes to Jep’s door and says that his wife has just died–an old flame of Jep’s–Jep and he stand in the foyer weeping. Then the man confesses he read his wife’s diary where she says Jep was the only true love of her life–a man she had broken it off with 35 years before! These ironic parallels and cross-overs into an almost alternate reality are poignant; it’s always poignant (and sometimes terrifying) to get a glimpse behind the curtain of Fate and our role in it, and its role in our lives.
Jep has a beautiful aging girlfriend who literally embodies this tension between times past and present. “I spend all my money on medical treatments,” she tells him. They are content in each other’s company, almost relieved to find even a semblance of love at their age; with another lady friend he rejoices that they haven’t ever slept together (of course he has to ask her to make sure) and says it’s wonderful to have something to look forward to. Faith in the future. Jep struggles to have it, and seeks it, while his “nostalgic” friend gives up and leaves Rome, calling it, in a moment of delicious understatement, a “disappointment”–he had lived there for 40 years.
Jep seeks “people who are younger than me. Things.” Thanks to his friend with a case of ancient keys, Jep is able to tour the secret places of Rome where everything is far, far older than he. He feels youthful before the statues, the sculptures, the paintings–although even there he can’t completely escape Time, as Sorrentino softly draws us in towards a medieval painting of a girl in her youth, her deshabillement somehow coy and innocent at the same time, her smile enigmatic, as if to say to him, “Remember this?” Flashback to when he was 25, swimming at the beach with some girls, including that one he loved but who ended up marrying someone else. He does not know why she left him, and it haunts him.
Haunting is a function of time as well. You can not be haunted (unless you are Mr. Scrooge) by the future or the present; the traditional ghosts are dead ones from the past. The only “spiritual” question Jep asks of the Cardinal at dinner is if it’s true the father was a great exorcist. What demons does Jep have in mind? The dinner party is thrown in honour of the 104 year old Sister Maria–a saint but not a Saint, as the culinary Cardinal makes clear (he tediously spouts recipes as dinner conversation rather than pithy theological bon mots). The Sister wears the nun’s garb, but she could not be further removed from the church, as demonstrated by the Cardinal’s sour faces and total lack of connection with her–he natters on about rabbit recipes and drives off in a shiny black limousine, while she speaks rarely, slowly, and at a low volume, but very clearly. The first time she speaks she utters, tellingly, a piece of wisdom cleverly consistent with the film’s theme. Essentially she says (is Jep listening?) that one doesn’t talk about life, one lives it.
Is she part of the supernatural, part of the “great beauty” that Jep has sought his whole life throughout the inner sancta of Roman streets and galleries since writing his only novel at age 26? We are not sure–but she appears to command a flock of flamingos. Jep seeks answers but asks the wrong questions, as he did above with the Cardinal, but the Sister knows what to tell him, unsolicited. “Roots are important,” she murmurs to Jep, and the circle is complete: the conflict inside him that was catalyzed by his 65th birthday may not be resolved, but her words act as a vital reminder to him (and to us of course) that it doesn’t have to be one or the other–stark differentiations of life moments, ages, and faces, like at his parties where the old desperately party with the young as if that youth can infuse them and alter their aged genes. Roots are important. The past is not only just as important as the present, but they are indispensable to each other as a means to moving forward…and finding that faith in the future. Jep’s blue-haired editor remarks dryly to him soon after his birthday, “You’ve changed. You’re always thinking.” His struggling climb ends when he stops obsessing over “the awkward predicament of existing in this world” and allows himself to remember, not like a series of photographic images gone by, for he must renounce the negative trap of nostalgia, but as a wake of feelings that wash away the animal numbness and open the door to the great beauty of creativity.
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| “Roots are important.” |
Criterion Critical Mass 