Review: "The Great Beauty" & How to Love a City

Can you love a city like you love a person? Can the pure romantic ardor for a particular urban environment replace, or possibly distract from, the complicated and messy entanglements of relationships?

That question, and the quixotic attempt to find the answer, is posed in the brilliant and gorgeous 2013 Italian film The Great Beauty. Set firmly in the calamitous Berlusconi period, the movie follows the sometimes glamorous, sometimes dissolute, often quite empty life of man named Jep. Recently turned 65, Jep works as a celebrity journalist, 40 years removed from his one and only triumph as a novelist. He spends his nights partying or interviewing his article subjects and sleeps away the daytime. He hangs out with his pretentious friends, drinks and smokes, and walks -- a lot -- around the city that entraps him and that he irrationally loves and cannot escape -- Rome. His goal, for too long, was to be the king of the Roman high life, the man who went to every party and could "make them a failure."

Now that phase of his life has left him sad. Jep needs a new purpose.

The film is a series of vignettes, a necklace of tales wrapped about the throat of a city that cages a man trying to find a goal in his rapidly receding life. In walking around and enjoying Rome, Jep is running away from his emotions, from a long and now deceased love, from a past once full of promise that has become a present of aimlessness, hopelessly trying to replace it with a passion for the great beauty of the Eternal City.

The movie's love for Rome, and its wistful meditation on the ravages of time and misplaced priorities, captures exactly what this blog feels about NYC -- and the course of life. Both the film and the blog are about how the love for a city affects and distracts us, and how the simple love for a plac helps us to leaven but also sometimes exacerbates the complexity of human entanglements. You can love a city -- a great city, a great beauty, like Rome or NYC -- but ultimately it cannot fulfill you like the love of a person. It can supplement but not replace that kind of love, enhance but not complete it. In loving a city, there is ultimately a sadness because it cannot really love you back.

But even then, you still can't abandon it.

If the 1974 movie Chinatown is about the corrupt and disturbing undercurrents of a big city -- in that case, Los Angeles -- revealed by private detective Jakes Gittes (one of its more infamous citizens), The Great Beauty is about the unrealistic romantic promise of one -- in this case, Rome -- by one of its obsessive inhabitants. One is about the darkness, the other about the light, of an alluring metropolis. But the two films, along with morose and romantic Issac in 1979's Manhattan, look at the man in the city, about the city, and of the city -- and how the man and their relationships with others are defined and mixed up by the city.

It is both a great and awful thing to have a great beauty in your life -- whether it's Rome, Los Angeles, NYC or someplace else. And yet that love for a city is the seed that can grow into a love for a person, and for life in general, and for something that is forever timeless and can give us true happiness.

In some ways, that's what Mr NYC is all about for me.

P.S. This expression of a complicated and ultimately unknowable love for a place, its people, and life, is best expressed not in words but in music.

The theme of The Great Beauty captures the film's melancholy romance about Rome the same way that the theme to Chinatown expresses that film's sleazy gaze and understanding of Los Angeles or the way that Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in Manhattan perfectly encapsulates the nervous energy and excitement of NYC.

You should listen to all three and you'll see -- or hear -- what I mean.