La grande bellezza

As I’ve been living in the States and at the moment haven’t left them for more than a year, I’ve been doing some armchair traveling, reading news and novels but above all through an addiction to foreign film. So I’ve decided to return to one of the forms in which I first published back in high school and college, and write occasional movie reviews for the penguin revolutions.

Federico Fellini would have been 94 on January 20. That happened to be the day I made it to E Street Cinema in Washington to see La grande bellezza or The Great Beauty, which had just been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Paolo Sorrentino’s film is also out on DVD with the Criterion Collection in March, a mark of distinction which first brought the film to my attention. A beautifully shot tribute to Rome and La Dolce Vita, I expected. But the film brilliantly exceeded my expectations and I would call it my favorite of 2013.

Toni Servillo plays Jep Gambardella, a journalist who is king of the social scene and celebrating his 65th birthday with hundreds of his friends in the first of the film’s grand soirées. Looking somewhat like a dapper version of Joe Biden, Jep instead has an incisive tongue which we see cut apart both a confused amateur artist he interviews and a longtime friend alike who pushes her self-regard too far in one of many rooftop cocktail circles. His novel, published decades ago, was a major literary success which he has never followed up. Now, facing mortality between the milestone birthday and news of the death o his first love, he walks out of a beautiful woman’s bed looking beyond the parties for something more. He discovers a potential soulmate in an unlikely place, but fleetingly. Some of his friends pass on from Rome. He encounters a pope-in-waiting who lovingly describes how to cook any dish that comes to his mind, but flees when asked about spiritual matters, and a Mother Teresa character who loved his novel, and seems to be the only one with answers.

There is poetry unbound in the dialogue, the characters are memorable and real even at their most exaggerated, the ensemble acting is excellent, and the beautifully shot world Sorrentino creates offers joy after surreal joy, from a botox clinic which might well (or might as well) have been one of the pieces of performance art Jep reviews for his friend’s magazine to a disappearing giraffe standing among the ruins of Caesar’s city. Sorrentino even weaves the capsized Costa Concordia into the film. La grande bellezza is a movie in which one loses track of time and is sad to see it go at the end. It’s melancholic and in places cutting, as any film about modern Italy rightly should be, but also warm and affectionate. All in all, a masterpiece, and a great beauty.

This Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

The shockwaves continue to reverberate through world politics after the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. I'm spending much of my time reading about the Middle East, news, blogs and live feeds - al Jazeera, The Arabist, the Guardian's live feed, Nicholas Kristof in Bahrain, and of course the young Netizens of the Middle East have all done great reporting, and I've found plenty of good commentary too.

There are far more brutal and evil men holding on to office in Iran and Libya - and surprisingly Bahrain - but one of the recently shaken leaders I'm most hoping to see thrown into the dustbin of history is unconnected to the uprisings and the Middle East for that matter, except that he claims he thought that 17-year-old Karima el-Mahroug aka "Ruby Heartstealer" was the granddaughter of his friend Mubarak.

Silvio Berlusconi has always been bad news for Italy, unfit to lead because of retention of his media holdings, more concerned about protecting himself from prosecution than leading Europe's fourth greatest power (sic). But it has never been quite as blatantly, shamelessly obvious to the entire world that this emperor has no clothes as in recent months. Tried by a jury of three women, representing the half of humanity which he has consistently debased as well as the spirit and letter of the law, I hope he is convicted and gets what he deserves.

In fact, I'm not sure Berlusconi hasn't damaged his country more than Mubarak or Ben Ali his. They were garden-variety secular dictators running repressive authoritarian systems in a part of the world that has seen little else in the past half-century. If they had never been born, similar men would most likely have played a similar role, taking off the uniform, never relinquishing power, letting their countries stagnate as the modern world passes them by. Globalization and a youth bulge have helped bring the Middle East to where it is now, awakening from false stability to a time of turbulence driven by the demands of a frustrated and young population.

Italy has the opposite of a youth bulge, it is one of the world's oldest countries per capita because contraception caught on a few decades ago. And its politicians have rarely been particularly virtuous - Bettino Craxi fled to Tunisia to avoid being jailed for corruption. But two decades ago, its political system was turned upside down by that wide ranging corruption scandal, Tangentopoli. The dominant party for 40 years vanished. There was an opportunity for Italy to move forward. And since Berlusconi lasted less than a year in his first term as prime minister in 1994, Italy did move forward, improving public finances, meeting the requirements for entry into the EU's new common currency through hard work.

But then Berlusconi was elected again. He is a unique political figure with really no discernable virtues, unless you define him negatively - if you disagree with the Italian left, Berlusconi keeps them out of power. The man certainly does not lead. He clowns, and he protects himself from prosecution for his crimes. There are able figures in the Italian government, and the country has not fallen apart, it has performed surprisingly well in the economic crisis over the past three years, while sovereign debt crises have smote Greece and threatened Portugal and Spain. But the fish rots from the head, and the head is rotting.

There is a saying that people get the government they deserve. And Berlusconi does retain popular legitimacy. But his actions and his character outweigh his popular support. Italy is a beautiful country with many wonderful people. And they deserve far better than Berlusconi for their prime minister.