The fall of ancient Rome

THE GREAT BEAUTY (A-minus) - It's about a girl. It's always about a girl.

Sofia Coppola meets Federico Fellini in Paolo Sorrentino's luscious valentine to Rome, "The Great Beauty" (better, as always, in Italian, "La Grande Bellezza"). It is one of the most visually stunning films I've ever seen. Whether you have the patience for its meandering 2 hours and 21 minutes depends on your mood and your willingness to be thrilled for the sake of aesthetics. (Recall that we bailed out of Sorrentino's politico-mob story from a few years ago "Il Divo.")

Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo in a career-defining performance) never followed up his novel from 40 years ago ("The Human Apparatus"), and at age 65 he's hit with the news that his one true love from his youth, Elisa, has died. He embarks on a half-hearted search for her and the couple they could have been. Yet he doesn't abandon la dolce vita, the playboy life that seduced him and distracted him from his life's work and is still in full force at his prodigious 65th birthday bash. In a blink, decades have passed, yet the trappings of luxury still hold him hostage. Classy parties last till dawn. He sleeps in. When he rises from his rooftop hammock, cocktail in hand, the Coliseum appears in view across the street.

Jep ambles through this existence in a high-society stupor. It's hard to tell if he's seeing ghosts or if he is one himself; this could easily be the flashback fever dream of a man taking his last breaths. He doesn't quite mope or look bored. It's as if he's truly observing the world around him for the first time in ages -- since the novel, perhaps -- and taking pleasure in the mundane, the everyday. He goes to bed with women in their 40s and 50s, but he gets no more pleasure from sex anymore. He's not torn up about it; he still has his memories. The women are elegant; natural beauties aging gracefully. (Sabrina Ferilli is a work of art.)

Jep dreams of the sea. It was there that he fell in love with Elisa.

Most evenings, he's hosting friends and various socialites. In one lazy discussion, he embarks on a classic putdown of another writer (she has actually completed a bunch of novels, the gall), dismissing her as a longtime tool of the Communist Party, having earned her break by being the leader's mistress back in the day.

People drop dead randomly. Women chant (including an angelic version of Robert Burns' "My Heart's in the Highlands"). They take off their tops and invite us into their bosom. They range from coked-up strippers or nuns. They are all smart and lovely, young and old, tall and thin, or short and squat. A life's worth of acquaintances.

The visuals are stunning. At times, Sorrentino's camera glides like a swan through his gilded sets. Nothing on the screen is wasted. Geese, supermodel pretty, graze on party scraps on a balcony before whooshing off. A young man in his underwear does soccer-ball tricks. A woman's high heels click along a vast marble floor. A 104-year-old Mother Teresa type ("You don't talk about poverty. You live it.") crawls on her knees up a flight of stairs. And always, the sea shimmers in Jep's many flashbacks.

The film is as dazzling as one of Jep's geezer-techno bashes. There's knife-throwing. Head-bashing performance art. A teenage pulp-art phenom. A cardinal who won't shut up about food recipes. A laptop DJ backed by a string quartet. A giraffe. When a magician makes the beast disappear, Jep stares at the void, gazing at what's no longer there. Touching.

A fascinating extended scene straight out of Terry Gilliam takes us to an epic room where a celebrity plastic surgeon injects faces and breasts and sweaty palms with a magic fluid that they eagerly pay 700 euros for. He flirts with one wistful old woman and tells her, tauntingly, "Want to go back 30 years, to when it always rained in late August?" That's the dull ache at the heart of this film.

That line is echoed later in this melancholic monologue by Jep's friend Romano:

I've spent all my summers making plans for September. No longer. Now I spend the summer remembering plans I'd made that faded away, due partly to laziness and partly to carelessness. What's wrong with feeling nostalgic? It's the only distraction left for those who have no faith in the future. Lunico. Without rain August is coming to an end and September isn't yet here. And I'm so ordinary. But there's no need to worry. It's all right. It's okay.

Not to fret. Life's a great beauty. And then you die.