160. Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grande Bellezza” (The Great Beauty) (2013) (Italy): “Combining the sacred and the profane” according to Sorrentino (on its music, and perhaps much else)
P aolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty has two small yet important facets in common with Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life . Both films begin with a profound quote that provides a key to the viewer for a full understanding of the film that follows. Both films use the music of “ Dies Irae ” ( Requiem for my Friend, which includes Lacrimosa 2 ) by Zbigniew Preisner (the talented composer of Kieslowski’s Dekalog and The Three Colors trilogy) and Henryk Gorecki’s 3 rd Symphony. Just as Mallick used an interesting quote from the Book of Job , the opening quote for The Great Beauty is from Sorrentino’s favorite author Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night. The quote is “ To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength. ” T he ‘travel’ in The Great Beauty is the figurative journey of Jep Gambardella, a journalist who at the age of 20 wrote a novel that mad...